Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

 

One of the most engaging images in the entire Bible is God as a passionate lover who seeks to woo his unfaithful wife back to himself.  Hosea, the 8^th century prophet, enriches the biblical understanding of God with this image.  Hosea’s wife had left the prophet and had gone after other men.  Yet, the prophet still loved her, longed for her and desired to be one with her.  Hosea saw in the experience of his faithful love for his unfaithful wife a faint glimmer of God’s love for his people.

 

Israel had abandoned the true worship of God.  She went courting the idols of her day. She broke her marriage covenant with God who had brought her up from the land of Egypt and made her his own possession.  Yet God does not give up.  He is the husband who longs for his wife even after she has played the prostitute. He longs to ignite in her heart the fire of his love. Nostalgically and romantically, God promises “I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart” (Hos 2:16).

 

Throughout Israel’s history, the desert stood for the graced moment of God leading and guiding his people. When God led his people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land, the journey to freedom took Israel through the Red Sea and into the desert.  Leaving the security of their home and the ready access to food, the Israelites faced the harsh realities of the desert existence for forty years.  These years of trial and testing were a period of strengthening.  Deprived of their comfort, the Israelites depended more deeply on God.  God quenched their thirst with water from the Rock.  God fed them with bread from heaven.  All the while, the people grew in their awareness that God was their protector.  He was forming them as his own.

 

Without the distractions of their former life in Egypt, their vision was unimpeded.  As the stars appear more brilliant against the desert night, so too God’s saving hand shown more clearly against Israel’s desert experience. Israel was journeying to the Promised Land.  And God was with her even in the trials and sufferings of the march to freedom. He was strengthening her weary limbs and gladdening her drooping spirit.

 

In a very real sense, all of humanity is journeying to the Promised Land.  Our Christian journey takes each of us straight through the waters of Baptism into the desert.  Today, many people in the world live in different types of deserts.  Some wander in the “desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life,” (Pope Benedict XVI, Homily at the Mass for the Inauguration of the Pontificate , April 24, 2005).  But not so for us.  A light guides us on our journey through the desert to true freedom.  This light is Christ himself.

 

The Son of God has become one with us in Jesus.  He came not simply to be a companion on our common journey, but our leader and our guide. He came to take us from the slavery of sin to the freedom of the children of God. He himself has passed through the desert of human emptiness.  After his own baptism by John in the Jordan, the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert. There for forty days and forty nights, he experienced the temptations that Israel had faced in her desert wandering. Where she had failed, he conquered. Jesus not only sets the example for us to follow but also gives us the strength to rise above the devil who longs to drag us down.

 

Jesus’ desert experience after his baptism contains the history of his whole public life.  Every day of his ministry, he came face to face with the power of Satan and proved to be the Stronger One.  In fact, at the end of his life, his Passion was his most dramatic confrontation with the devil.  It was his desert experience intensified.  In the Passion, Jesus is stripped of clothes, of food, of drink, of home, of friends and of life itself.  He is deprived even of the consolation of the Father’s presence. Yet, he trusts in the will of the Father.

 

The Father has led him to the Cross and Jesus embraces this emptiness in obedience to the Father’s will.  Against the deprivation and darkness of Golgotha, Jesus prays, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  He allows the Father to lead him from the death of the cross to the glory of the Resurrection.  He becomes the new Moses leading all people to the Promised Land.

 

Each Lent, the Lord calls us to journey with him to Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is the crowning moment of the life of every Christian.  For it is here that we follow Jesus to the Cross and to glory. Jesus repeats to us the invitation he gave to his first disciples.  "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem" (Mk 10:33).  As we join with Jesus in our Lenten journey, he leads us through the desert.  This is a privileged place of encounter with God. God draws us away from the distractions of life so that he can stir up within us the passion of his love. We are the unfaithful Israel.  He is the faithful one who says to all who worship the idols of materialism, consumerism, and narcissism “I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy; I will espouse you in fidelity” (Hosea 2: 21-22).

 

During the forty days of Lent, we live the desert experience through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Every effort we make to pray more intensely, fast more often and give more generously creates for us a space free of the distractions and comforts of this life. We give up time for prayer. We deny our bodies food.  We share our material gifts with others. In each instance, we stand empty. But in such a condition of unencumbered openness, God finds ready entrance into our life.

 

Through fasting, we deny our body in a spiritual discipline. Many people today are rightly concerned with the health and the appearance of their body. They limit what they eat. They avoid certain foods.  This is dieting.  Fasting is something else.  It is denying the body certain legitimate foods and denying the satisfaction of our appetites for the health of the soul. It is the training of the will to say “no” to the things of this world so that we can be free to say “yes” to God.

 

In one of his homilies, Saint John Chrysostom remarks, “As bodily food fattens the body, so fasting strengthens the soul; imparting it an easy flight, it makes it able to ascend on high, to contemplate lofty things and to put the heavenly higher than the pleasant and pleasurable things of life.”  Once the disciples found Jesus fasting and without food.  They questioned him and he responded, “I have food of which you do not know…My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 4: 32.34).  Fasting trains us to do the will of the Father. And, God’s will is that we should love one another.

 

Through almsgiving, we take from our material goods and give to the poor.  Giving what we have to those who are without includes more than a donation to charity. Almsgiving can be the gift of our money. It also can be a gift of food or clothing, a good work, a visit or sharing some of our time.

 

Each time we give from what we have to someone who is poor materially or spiritually, we come into direct contact with the Lord himself.As St. Peter Chrysologus teaches, “The poor man's hand is the treasury of Christ, since Christ receives everything that the poor man receives” (Sermo VIII, 4).  Therefore, what we give goes into the hand of Christ.  We ourselves, putting aside a selfish clinging to what is ours, enter into a deeper communion with Christ who gives us what is truly his, the gift of eternal life.

 

Throughout Lent, we make an added effort to pray. As air is to the body, prayer is to the soul. Prayer, our formal and informal conversation with God, is our first approach to God. However, all of our prayer is actually our response to the Holy Spirit living and working within us.  Even when we do not know what to say, “the Spirit...comes to the aid of our weakness; ...the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings” (Rm 8:26).

 

The Holy Spirit inspires our personal prayer and moves us to enter more devoutly into the prayer of the Church. The Spirit draws us to a more frequent celebration of the Eucharist, daily if possible, and to a fervent celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation during Lent. The Stations of the Cross; visits to the Blessed Sacrament; Holy Hours; parish Lenten missions; Marian devotions, especially the Rosary: these are some ways in which we allow the Holy Spirit to enter our life more fully.

 

Many Fathers of the Church understood the intimate connection between prayer and the Holy Spirit.  They witness to a way of praying the Our Father that makes this explicit.  At the point of the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, after the words “Thy kingdom come”, they would insert the words “May thy Spirit come and purify us” (St. Gregory of Nissa, Homily on the Our Father, III, 6).  As Serafino of Sarov, a Russian saint of the last century, said, “The true end of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.  Prayer, fasting … [and] charity, these are only means to acquire the Holy Spirit.”  

 

Through our Lenten practices, we give up our time to pray more.  We give away our gifts to the poor.  We give up the satisfaction of our body.  Like Israel of old, we enter the desert without our normal comforts and routines.  We embrace our human emptiness with Jesus in the desert and with Jesus on the Cross.  Joined to him, we are drawn more deeply into the Paschal Mystery.  We come to share more fully in the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We are reconciled to God.