DEACON TOM ANTHONY

Saturday, February 21, 2015

THE FIRST WEEK OF LENT 2015

Just as Jesus entered the desert for a period of forty days, we have now followed into our own spiritual desert with the beginning of the Season of Lent. Here, amidst nothingness, we are encouraged to examine our faith and relationship with God all the while focusing on the Crucified Christ, the Christ who suffered, the Christ who was crucified, and the Christ who died so that all of us would obtain eternal life. That is Christ’s longing for us: salvation and happiness through a relationship with him.

We must take this opportunity to envelop ourselves within our faith and live our faith every moment of our existence. The world around us must be pushed away until only Christ remains. Then we can experience the true effect of his presence. He has always been with us; it is us in our supreme arrogance that has forgotten him. In the past, we have tried to convince ourselves  that happiness can be achieved without him. This has left us empty and suffering; truly in a hopeless desert. But the desert we seek is different. It is one which offers an oasis of eternal water and eternal life. This we will only have to seek. And as long as we seek it, it will definitely be found
Through the sufferings of the Great Flood, God offered all of us a Covenant of forgiveness and love. Water was used as a symbol of cleansing and our own baptism. We are encouraged to meditate on this during Lent: God promises us forgiveness and love, not destruction. He has not revealed himself so as to destroy us but to rebuild us in his own image with a revelation of our birthright: Children of God.

Those who rebuked God in their ignorance suffered greatly just as many of us have when we turned away from God. Yet, even those who apparently had no chance at salvation and were representative of evil were welcomed into the Kingdom of God through the sufferings and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The First Letter of Peter offers an amazing description of how Christ descended into Hell to give instruction and salvation to all those who came before with those who perished in the flood being specified directly. Each of us is as important to God and can look forward to help and reassurance from him; if only we accept what he is offering and take that first step into the desert to truly find him as he calls to us.

In our desert we must turn to prayer, fasting, and acts of charity to understand our relationship with Christ. Through this understanding we can experience his love. The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ is essential to this understanding. We must walk the Passion with him; taking up our own crosses and walking beside him. To know him is to become like him in our sufferings and acts of love. We suffer by fasting and going without while we perform Acts of Charity to express love. We then naturally remove all the clutter and obstacles that we have put in our lives which has blurred the true presence of Christ.

Let us go forward together, onward to Calvary. We are all united in the suffering as one community. Because of this, we must help each other in the very same way. Unified suffering creates unified love.

Deacon Tom

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