It is a little over a week before we enter the annual Lenten season and it’s another opportunity for people to make all kinds of resolutions in the hope of turning around their lives to become more Christian-like. It is an opportunity also to show greater love to your family and neighbours—something the world needs a lot of these days.
The holy season of Lent calls for penance and interior renewal, which enables us to prepare for the great Feast of Easter, but it is not a time for ‘sack clothes and ashes’, although there are many Catholics who make every effort to cleanse their souls and begin again.
When on Ash Wednesday the priest makes a cross with ashes on our foreheads, he reminds us that Genesis 3:13 says, “Remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” And as Francis Hernandez says in “His Conversation with God,” God wants us to detach ourselves from the things of the world, like Carnival, and return to Him. He wants us to abandon sin, which makes us grow old and die and for us to return to the fount of life and joy.
Lent is a time for getting closer to God. Hernandez said, we cannot let this season pass by without stimulating in our souls a deep and effective desire to go back once again, to return like the prodigal son to be closer to God. St Paul says that Lent is an excellent time for us to bring about our conversion.
As Hernandez says, “Now is the time when this beginning again in Christ is going to be sustained by a special grace from God, proper to the liturgical season that has just started.” He continued, “That is why the Lenten message is replete with joy and hope, even though it is a message of penance and mortification.”
In the words of A G Dorronsoro in his book “Time to Believe”, he wrote, “When any one of us realise he is sad, he must think, ‘It is because I am not close enough to Christ…’ When one of us become aware, for instance, of an inclination towards ill-humour, towards bad temper, he must similarly remind himself. If he throws the blame on things around him, he will be wide of the mark; he will be looking in the wrong direction.
“Sometimes,” said Hernandez, “it is possible that a certain apathy or spiritual sadness may have its root cause in tiredness or sickness…but it more frequently stems from a lack of generosity in doing what God asks of us, from an effectually feeble struggle to mortify our senses, from a lack of concern for other people; in a word, it has its origins in a state of lukewarmness.
“If we stay close to Christ, we will always find the cure for our lack of possible ardour and recharge ourselves with the strength to overcome our lukewarmness and those defects that we could never overcome by ourselves,” he added.
Let us make ‘growing closer to God’ a promise we will keep, for the upcoming Lenten season.
•Vernon Khelawan is a columnist for Catholic Media Services Limited (Camsel), the official communications arm of the Archdiocese of Port-of-Spain. Its offices are located at 31 Independence Square. Telephone: 623-7620