Conversion

WITH Ash Wednesday, we again begin another season of Lent. Let’s hope that the annual cycle of time, be it chronological, fiscal, academic and especially liturgical, carry a lot of meaning to which we should be attentive.

Time cannot exist by itself. Never an abstract reality, it has to adhere to a substance, such as we are, and therefore it just cannot be a measure of before and after, but is some space for us to achieve a particular purpose.

This is not the place to explain the point, but time converges the objective and subjective dimensions of life’s objective, God’s plan for it and our response. We have to understand and relish the many implications involved in the nature and the meaning of time.

This liturgical season of Lent highlights a basic need, that of conversion, from the inmost part of our being, our heart and mind, to the most social and global dimension of our life.

This is the be-all and end-all of Lent, supposed to be a permanent feature in our consciousness, not to serve as a wet blanket, but rather as a stimulus for us to return to the orbit proper to us. It’s like a corrective maintenance for us.

We have to be wary of the many factors, especially in our current culture and world environment, that tend to weaken our awareness of this need, and even to distort and annul it.

We have been warned so many times before by saints and Church leaders that our sense of sin down the ages has been quite skewed and left out of sync with our faith in God’s plan for us.

Directly said, we need conversion because we have fallen away from our God, our Creator and Father. Yes, it’s time to remind ourselves that we come from God, not just from dust, and that we are meant to live our life with him and to return to him.

Lent is a time to recall how sin entered into the world, how it tampered our nature and our life, how it has been cured, and how we can attain that cure. In a manner of speaking, Lent supplies a crucial missing link in the understanding of our life.

It gives us a more complete and realistic picture of our life, since we tend to disregard some not-so-pleasant aspects of it. Thus, it’s not just dark and hard things that it connotes. It actually points to a human triumph, to joy and peace.

This is because while Lent tells us to grapple with sin and everything that it involves—temptations, effects and structures of sin from the personal level up to the most social aspect—it also reassures us of victory due to God’s endless mercy.

Lent guides us through the way of conversion and transformation, from sin to grace, from moral anemia to radiating vitality, from spiritual death to life. It teaches us that with grace we have to undertake ascetical struggle.

“Where sin abounded, grace abounded even more,” St. Paul tells us. (Rom 5,20) Many other references in the Gospel give us reasons to be hopeful and optimistic about our human condition immersed in sin.

There’s just one thing that I would like to highlight regarding Lent. It is for us to develop a deep spirit of penance. This is the constant awareness of our sinfulness and what we can do about it.

Our sins, failures and weaknesses should not be a deterrent in our relationship with God. With faith in God’s mercy, with humility, we can make them an occasion to get to God even more closely. He always waits for us and is very eager to forgive us.

Our attitude should be like that of the woman with hemorrhage who struggled to touch our Lord’s hem, like that of the blind Bartimaeus who shouted to get Christ’s attention, like that of the paralytic who had to be lowered down the roof to get to our Lord.

With faith in God’s overpowering love for us, in God who loves us so much that He gave his only Son, “so that whoever believes in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting,” (Jn 3,16) we can resurrect from our sin.

We have to richly embroider this spirit of penance with a lot of details—making acts of atonement and reparation, confessing regularly, doing works sof mercy and our work well, being merciful ourselves, etc.

All these make our life truly beautiful!