This Wednesday Lent 2021 begins, although many of us have the feeling that we have not yet emerged from Lent 2020. This one brought with it the most demanding ascetic practices that none of us could have ever imagined that a government could impose on us. After weeks confined to our homes, like modern stylites, we were allowed to go out with the sackcloth of the mask, although we were forbidden to touch and kiss each other and to go to bars and restaurants, in addition to the obligation to perform numerous hydroalcoholic ablutions.
Covid-19 containment measures are a desert of deprivation that we have all accepted for the benefit of our bodily health and the health of those around us. Suffering a little is not bad if the aim is to protect life. But what about eternal life, is it worth taking care of?
Lent reminds us every year that yes, spiritual health, like bodily health, requires care and maintenance. It is a time of penance, of prayer, of fasting, of almsgiving... A time of renunciation that does not seek them in themselves but in view of a greater good: to give solemnity to Easter, the feast in which we celebrate the liberation from the slavery of Egypt, the victory of Christ over Pharaoh.
How can we celebrate freedom without knowing that we are slaves? Lent helps us to discover the chains that bind us to the little pleasures of everyday life, to coffee, beer, cigarettes..... We call them in diminutive, but their shackles are thick, not to mention the savings account!
Pope fasting and almsgiving Will I be able to give up my tastes, my money? Will I be able to see the poor, not as an annoying object, but as a brother who suffers and needs me?
– Supernatural prayer will take us out of our ego to put us in the presence of the great Ego - the Ego.Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am (Ex 3:14))-and to realize our littleness before the mystery of the One who is eternal, of infinite love. These forty days will reveal to us that we live condemned to give ourselves everything and that we need true freedom to be able to reach the other, to be able to love.
In his message for this Lent, Pope Francis states that, "in the present context of worry in which we live and in which everything seems fragile and uncertain, to speak of hope might seem provocative." Isn't it great to have a little rock and roll among all the boring ballads that we men and women of today have turned our self-pitying existence into in the midst of the pandemic? To hope in God, to trust that He will lead us out of this as He led the people of Israel into the Promised Land, to live this desert time consciously, not as an imposition, not as the ultimate anticovid decree, but as an experience of encounter with God, will make us authentically free.
It is time to believe, to hope, to love. It is a time of freedom.
