Daily reflections will be available on this blog for Lent 2019
The word ‘Lent’, I am told,
comes from an old English word which means Spring. And this can be a helpful
start. Lent is the Church’s season for a springtime of the soul. It is a time
for the dead things to fall away and the new to spring forth in healthy growth.
We need to begin Lent
confident that our Lord Jesus Christ wants us to be renewed in Him, and that He
sends His Holy Spirit to the Church to renew her. And that means each and every
one of us.
In
order to get to the first principles of Lent, the word to properly grasp
is conversion. Any
Christian renewal in the Church must be about conversion.
This is not a one-off event,
but an on-going process for most of us. The key to renewal is conversion, and
there are two sides to it: there is a turning away, and, a turning towards. We
turn away from all that is away from Christ, and we turn towards all that is of
Christ, in fact, Christ Himself. For there to be renewal in our Lent, in our
spring-time, there must be a falling away of the dead things, and a turning
towards the life-giving. Christ called this “repent and believe”. This was His
principle exhortation as He proclaimed the Kingdom of God. So fundamentally we
repent of sin and we turn to Christ. We turn away from all that is deathly
(i.e. sin, selfishness, evil etc), and we turn towards that which is
life-giving (i.e. Jesus Christ the Light and Saviour of the world).
Lenten Counsel Jesus’ call to conversion does not aim at outward works but at
the conversion of the heart,
or interior conversion. Without
inner conversion, outward penances remain sterile and false.
However,
interior conversion will be expressed in visible signs, gestures and works of
penance. So we are not saying here, that conversion is restricted to the
private and interior self, but that this is where it must begin. This interior
place, which is called the heart, is the source of our actions, decisions, and
over time our character. So when the heart is converted, when it repents of sin
and turns to Christ, everything in life is affected.
So
our Lenten practices should be focused on conversion, the conversion of our hearts, away
from sin and to Christ our Lord.
Fr Ian
Fr Ian
[Read more about this at CCC 1430-1433 in your Catechism.]
