7th Sunday Ordinary Time A February 23, 2020
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
This coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.
I heard a story recently of a Catholic woman whose job required her to serve members of the public. For some reason she felt she should hide the ashes she had received at Mass on Ash Wednesday. So, she combed her hair in bangs to hide the large black smudge on her forehead. To her surprise, her first four customers displayed ashes on their foreheads.
Pressure to suppress religious expression in public is real. We all experience the expectations of society to restrict religious expression to our Churches, Mosques and Synagogues.
This Wednesday, if anyone asks why we are sporting ashes on our forehead we might respond by saying that ashes remind us that we are mortal. Everyone will die. But just as God breathed into earth to create the first man and woman, Jesus also breathes his Holy Spirit into our hearts calling us to a new, eternal life in heaven. This is our belief. And so we are happy to share this faith in public after Mass on Ash Wednesday.
The grace of Lent is the gift of repentance. Throughout these forty days we respond to God’s grace of repentance with prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These spiritual exercises don’t make us holy. We can’t make ourselves holy by our own will power. Holiness is a gift through which Jesus gives us a share in his own life.
Like physical exercises, spiritual exercises keep us in shape. Spiritual exercises don’t affect muscle tone, but they do help us change those habits that keep us from loving more, being more considerate, being more forgiving and kind. The spiritual exercises of prayer, alms-giving and fasting serve to help us hear today’s Gospel message to strive to be a peace-maker by turning the other cheek; by being generous to those who would cheat us; by loving not just our friends but our enemies too. In this life on earth we know that none of us will “be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect”. But by staying in spiritual shape, by doing our spiritual exercises we are responding to God’s grace of repentance; we are trying to become better Christians; we are not letting our weakness be a source of despair; we are allowing God’s grace to give us hope that in trying to do God’s will, we shall, like his Son, find our human fulfillment with God in heaven.
So let us receive the Sacrament of Penance and Eucharist regularly throughout Lent in order to see better our purpose on earth, to better understand the meaning of love and forgiveness, to better respond to God’s grace of repentance in our life.
Sincerely yours in Christ
+Bishop Richard Grecco