AD ASTRA PER ASPERA: POPE FRANCIS AND LENT 2024

    In spite of what is commonly thought about in Mobile, thanks to Mardi Gras, Lent begins in just a few days! Here is a synopsis of Pope Francis’ “Message for Lent.”

    He wants to insist that the purpose of Lent is always a journey to freedom, but he recognizes that this journey "is a demanding one." Like Israel in the desert, we can also "cling to an oppressive bondage…when we feel hopeless, wandering through life like a desert…” How often have we thought that a short jaunt has turned into a slog! It’s easy to give up.

But as the Holy Father challenges us to “open our eyes to reality,” he wants to ask us to face two questions: “Where are you? (Gen 3:9)” and “Where is your brother? (Gen 4:9).” We don’t want to remain “weary and indifferent,” but under the burden of “Pharoah” it is too easy to want exactly that—we are afflicted by “an inexplicable longing for slavery [that is] a kind of attraction to the security of familiar things, to the detriment of our freedom.” We know this feeling all too well, and in the terms of sacramental theology it is called “concupiscence”—a residual inclination backward when we are being called and enabled to journey forward.

Lent is a time, then, of introspection: it is a time for self-examination: “Do I want a new world? Am I ready to leave behind my compromises with the old?” We all know, too, that it’s easy to make a superficial “Yes” to these questions but very difficult in practice to act in such a way as to keep us on that path to freedom. “Unlike Pharoah, God does not want subjects, but sons and daughters.” But it’s often easier to avoid the responsibility of adoption and remain subjected. Lent is a time to “struggle,” to reject “the idols we set up for ourselves… To be looked up to by all, to domineer over others… We can be attached to money, to certain projects, ideals, or goals, to our position, to a tradition, even to certain individuals.” How hard it is to reject “the allure of [this] lie”!!!

Lent is especially a time “to act [that] also means to pause. To pause in prayer…to pause like the Samaritan in the presence of a wounded brother or sister. …For this reason, prayer, almsgiving and fasting are not three unrelated acts, but a single movement of openness and self-emptying, in which we cast out the idols that weigh us down, the attachments that imprison us.”

This can be a time when we can make “…decisions, small and large, that are countercurrent. [They are decisions] capable of altering the daily lives of individuals and entire neighbourhoods (sic), such as the ways we acquire goods, care for creation, and strive to include those who go unseen or are looked down upon.

This should be a joyful task, Pope Francis insists: “…let others see joyful faces, catch the scent of freedom and experience the love that makes all things new, beginning with the smallest and those nearest to us. This can happen…”

Francis concludes with comments he made at World Youth Day in Lisbon: “Keep seeking and be ready to take risks. …let us find the courage to see our world, not as being in its death throes but in a process of giving birth… Such is the courage of conversion, born of coming up from slavery.”

May our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving during this Lent help to bring about the vision of a new world of re-birth into true freedom in the Lord.               -Fr. David