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First Sunday of Lent
5 March 2006
Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!
Dear Friends in Christ,
The Lord Jesus began his public preaching with a clarion call to conversion: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the Gospel." (Mark 1:15). But as St. Mark tells us in today’s Gospel, the Lord Jesus spent forty days in the desert before beginning his public ministry of preaching and deeds of power by which He revealed His divine glory, and these desert days (described in greater detail by St. Matthew and St. Luke than by St. Mark) constituted a private preparation for His public mission. Moreover, that He passed these forty days in fasting and prayer reveals that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets by completing the work of Moses and Elijah, both of whom also spent forty days in retreat as a preparation for their life’s work.
If even the Lord Jesus, true God from true God, needed a time apart from the world to prepare for His proclamation of the Gospel, how much more do we require the grace of such times of prayer and purification? Christians seeking to live the interior life intensely usually find it helpful from time to time to spend a few days of prayer and recollection at monasteries, religious houses, or retreat centers, and each year the entire Church observes the Forty Days of Lent in imitation of Christ as a preparation for Easter. At the center of these forty days of fasting, prayer, and works of mercy should be the living and active Word of God, and I invite every member of this spiritual family to spend time this Lent with Holy Scripture in the meditative reading of lectio divina, in praying the Liturgy of the Hours, and in adoration of the Lord Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament. It is this union with the Lord Jesus that reveals His Gospel to be a complete, coherent, comprehensive Way of Life and moves us to surrender our entire lives to Him in the obedience of faith.
To make these forms of prayer more readily available, we will gather each Sunday of Lent at 3:30 pm to celebrate Solemn Vespers and Eucharistic Adoration; please consider returning to church on each of the five Sundays of Lent for an extra hour of prayer. We will also celebrate 40 Hours of Adoration of the Lord Jesus during the Third Week of Lent on March 21st, 22nd, and 23rd. Please plan now to join us for Mass, Confessions, the Liturgy of the Hours, and private prayer during those 40 Hours. My friends, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Let us heed the call of Christ to repentance and faith by becoming Evangelical Catholics who know the Gospel, believe the Gospel, live the Gospel, and share the Gospel with others.
Father Newman