ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Next before Lent 2007

Fr Ivan Aquilina

“Believe in the light so that you may be children of light.”

We are embarking upon forty days of preparation for one service. That is a long time to prepare for one service. Why do we spend 40 days preparing for one service? That is 960 hours of preparation for a few hours worth of liturgy. What is going on?

Lent is not a preparation for Holy Week, neither for Easter Day or the Easter Season it is a preparation for the celebration of the Paschal Mystery. This celebration is so deep and meaningful that it is spanned over three days, the night of Maundy Thursday, the day of Good Friday and Holy Saturday which reaches its culmination during the Holy Vigil, that most important service of all services that the Church celebrates.

In the Sacred Triduum (the name for these three days) the Church re-lives what it celebrates. Out of time and space the Church looks in silence at what lies in its very heart: the self giving, loving moment when hope was restored to men, when forgiveness was bought at a very high price, when love triumphed over sin and death once and for all. The Church is not only asked to watch closely as events unfold and meditate upon them, the Church is asked to participate in them. It is a sort of our annual springtime when we discard our old self and assume upon us the person of Christ.

How do we assume Christ?

We take Christ upon us by helping him in the washing of the feet, by allowing him to feed us at that glorious altar of the upper room, by walking to the garden and waiting and watching. We take Christ upon us by witnessing and re-living the injustice carried out on the innocent, the parody of a trial which makes a mockery of truth and the execution of a bitter and unjust sentence betraying what sinful humanity is capable of. We take Christ upon us by re-living the way Christ responded creatively to all this by turning a tragedy into a moment of love, by turning the scaffold into a pulpit, the tomb of death in a womb of life that does not stop offering real life. Joining in all this is life changing, life refreshing and life giving. Come and reflect about this joining our life with the life of Jesus every Friday during Lent as together we keep the Stations of the Cross after Evening Mass.

I hope that like me you now can see that the symbolic 40 days are not enough. We are called to work with what we are given, let us expand these forty days by our prayer and fasting and penance and holy life. Let us go with Christ in the desert to face our own demons and call them by name. Let us use the desert a place of death to die to ourselves and to be born again to Christ, to renounce our attachment to this fleeting world and be led only by the Light of Christ, that light that will shine victoriously and acclaimed in the Easter Vigil, the light that will never fade as we irradiate it through our lives. We need to believe in the light to be children of light. That is what Jesus exhorts us for tonight. During these forty days let us renounce darkness and make way for the Light.

During this solemn season we renounce darkness in bite size. Every day for forty days we seek an area of our life where the Light of Christ is not shining and we clear that ground of all the weeds so that the Divine Gardner may come in to do his planting as he calls us by name on Easter Day.

This is Lent, with Moses we stand in front of the burning bush and with him we remove our sandals as indeed the ground of lent is holy ground, the place where God meets us and transforms us through the Paschal Mystery.