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LENT 2025The Church has begun the season of Lent, a forty day period in which we take stock of our lives in order to prepare ourselves for the high point of the liturgical year, that is, the celebrations of Holy Week and Easter. Without maintenance a car would soon become undrivable and a home would fall down around our ears. Without the kind of loving maintenance that you Mums and Dads and your children contribute, a family, too, would stop functioning well. If we do not tend a garden, flowers die and weeds take over. So it is with our lives. We may be flying along with the wind in our sails, or we may be just drifting along going nowhere in particular. Either way, it is important that we learn to head in a direction that is life-giving. The aim of Lent is to open our minds and hearts to God’s Spirit who will show us Jesus and also show us the sin in our lives which is stopping our movement towards him, and causing us to be stuck in the spiritual doldrums or, worse still, is driving us onto a reef where we are breaking up. If we look at our own sin in all its starkness and take our eyes off God, we can experience only embarrassment, guilt and shame that we have acted so badly. Or we experience disappointment, or perhaps depression, when we think of how sin has got us into the mess we are in. In a state of sin, we are like a diseased plant, deprived of sun and water. However we appear on the outside, inside, our soul is not alive. There is a special grace in Lent for us to change, to repent, to open our hearts and our lives to say Yes to God’s loving invitation. So the first step is to fix our gaze on God who is love and there is no better way to do this than to look upon Jesus on the cross. We need to change. Only God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit can change us. Now God is always loving us, and always wanting to pour into us the Spirit of his Son, Jesus. The problem is never God. God, however, waits on our readiness and our invitation. He waits on our longing. So the key to Lent is prayer. Then let me cry out to God in my distress, and open my heart to his grace. It will feel like a purifying fire because that is what it is. It will hurt to face the truth and to take a stand against temptation. But with God’s grace we can do this. We cannot do it on our own, but we are not on our own. The one who knows us, loves us and offers us exactly the grace we need now to turn towards life. It is the breath of God that will fill our sails and move us towards him who is the source of all life. The real enemy is personal sin, that is to say, the sin we commit when we freely choose against the good and in favour of what is bad. This is the real soul destroyer and it is this that adds to the pollution that poisons others. Jesus taught us that God remains loving, however we might reject his love. We are always being offered the exact grace we need to live and to live to the full. Lent is a time to focus on this truth and to listen for what God is saying to us, while seriously determining to try to do what we know we must do to stop putting off the journey of the heart which alone leads to life.
Excerpt from Fr Michael Fallon on Lent
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