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A WORD FROM THE PASTOR
A Joyful Return
Our desire for pure and perpetual joy is one thing, and the actual reality is another. It seldom happens to us that any joy comes so pure as not to be tempered by sorrow. Besides, when pure joy does come, it is very brief, for life batters at its sails. For many of us, life itself is an embodiment of contradictions: love and hatred, strength and weakness, humiliation and glory, truth and falsehood, direction and chaos, life and death. All these are weighing so heavily on us.
Each of us, in some part of life, finds something upsetting that robs us of our joy. However, we believe that, God being the source of perfect joy, the more consistent we are in our closeness with God, the more permanent will be our joy. So Lent invites us to return to God and be reconciled with him in such a way that our relationship with him will remain intimate and lasting.
God appeals to us during this Lent through Joel: "Return to me with all your heart" (Joel 2:12). St Paul reminds us that Lent is the "acceptable time... the day of salvation" (2 Cor 6:2). The ashes we used on Ash Wednesday remind us that if we have to rise to new life of pure joy, we have to acknowledge that our relationship with God has not been close enough, and hence the need to return to him with a broken heart. The good deeds such as prayer, fasting and almsgiving that our Lord mentions in the Gospel (Mt 6:1-18) are meant to make us pleasing to God; but they must be undertaken for the right reason. For example, what we save by fasting is to be offered to the hungry as almsgiving. These are Lenten opportunities.
Just as the spring brings a cheer to heart of those who look forward to a time of flowering and growth, so we are invited to approach the season of Lent with a hope of renewal and focus on the opportunities for deepening our relationship with God and thus set our feet firmly on the path to fuller joy.
Let us take efforts to return joyfully to the Lord.
In the Service of the Lord,
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