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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