Ash Wednesday thoughts

WITH Ash Wednesday, we again open the season of Lent when everyone is invited to a rigorous discipline of prayer and sacrifice.

May this invitation not fall on deaf ears and indifferent hearts. We need to pray and offer sacrifices in this life just as we need to eat and breathe. The former are vital to our spiritual life just as the latter to our bodily life.

This is in preparation for the celebration of the Paschal or Easter mystery -- the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord.

This mystery is the culmination and the summarizing point of Christ's redemptive work. This is where the darkest and the brightest parts of Christianity meet, where the severest of human malice gives way to our ultimate salvation.
This is where death and condemnation generate everlasting life and eternal glory! For such a tremendous reward promised to us, we actually are being asked very little -- typical of divine logic.

But all this, in Christ -- "through Him, with Him and in Him," as we say it in the Holy Mass. Those words should strike us with more intense meaning.

Our Mother the Church wants to remind us that in the midst of all our human concerns, there is only one thing that is necessary: to be with God, through Christ in the Spirit.

Our tendency is to lose focus, to get entangled, and finally to lose our supernatural sense, our faith, our relation with God. This is when we lose our innocence, complicate our life, and become most prone to other evils.

This is a common situation that we need to rectify always. Thus, in Lent we are asked for nothing less than another conversion, a radical change of heart, a thorough purification, an exhaustive "reconditioning."

Precisely the liturgy of Ash Wednesday vividly reminds us of where we come from, who we actually are, what our goal is. The sad fact is we often treat ourselves as mere animals, or economic and social beings.

We often forget we are children of God, meant to act like God. These are basic truths we should never forget, truths that should shape and determine our life.

These truths bring to our attention that there is actually a spiritual and supernatural dimension of our life. Ours is not simply made of senses and meant for bodily delights and pleasures. We're meant for a lot more.

Obviously, we have to do all this praying and sacrificing in a natural and discreet way, smiling, cheerful and even with style and great poise. That's how it should be. We have been told to avoid the sackcloth while mortifying ourselves.

But let's really be generous. Christian life is of course a matter of grace, something given to us gratuitously. But it is also a matter of our generosity, of our all, since God has commanded us to love him with all that we have got.
Try spending time talking with our Lord, better in a suitable place. Try fasting, abstaining and doing other little mortifications, and you'll see what a big difference they make.

We have to discover the awesome beauty involved in loving God. Praying and offering sacrifices, while demanding effort and causing some pain, are actually a minuscule investment for a tremendous return that will surely come.

Prayer and sacrifices bring us to another world without leaving the present one. They widen our perspectives, deepen our understanding of things, empower us to get close, to "get connected" with God, the ultimate cause of our joy. How many saints have marveled in praying and offering sacrifices! It's about time we seriously include these indispensable elements as guiding principles in our life style.

Okay, there is awkwardness in the beginning, but that can easily be overcome. With the exercise of faith, with persistence and effort to ignore worldly hecklers, we can manage to learn the art of praying and offering sacrifices. More than whatever worldly expertise we may manage to acquire, this ability to pray and to offer sacrifices constitutes the greatest skill we can have.