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charlottediocese.org/catholicnews | March 11, 2011 CATHOLIC NEWS HERALD
LETTERS
GROWTH
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your own words. Before lunch, spend one minute praying for wisdom, that you can make good use of your limited time and energy during the afternoon to serve God and neighbor. On the way home, ask the Holy Spirit to help you learn the lesson that God was trying to teach that day. At bedtime, pray for peace, for your family and for the world. One minute of prayer four times a day can transform your life! You may also consider fasting and abstaining from cell phones, tv, and eating meat on Mondays and Wednesdays as well as the Fridays in Lent. Offer your sacrifice each time for a particular person or situation in need of God’s blessing. This is a real consciousness-raiser that can clear out space in our hearts and souls, not just in our stomachs, for God and other people. Finally, make the Stations of the Cross once during Lent. There are 14 stations, so perhaps pray two of them each week during Lent, one on Wednesdays and the other on Fridays. Gather as a family and take your time being with Jesus, meditating on His holy mysteries. Read the Scriptures, sit in silence together and truly listen to that silence. Share your awareness with each other and sing a verse of the Stabat Mater. With Our Lady and St. John, let us stand faithfully at the foot of the Cross of Christ this Lent! Father John Vianney Hoover serves at New Creation Monastery in Charlotte.
The idolatry of goods, on the other hand, not only causes us to drift away from others, but divests man, making him unhappy, deceiving him, deluding him without fulfilling its promises, since it puts materialistic goods in the place of God, the only source of life. How can we understand God’s paternal goodness if our heart is full of egoism and our own projects, deceiving us that our future is guaranteed? The practice of almsgiving is a reminder of God’s primacy and turns our attention towards others, so that we may rediscover how good our Father is, and receive His mercy.” On the practice of almsgiving, our Holy Father reminds us of what Our Lord mentioned in the recent Gospel message: we need not have excessive worry and anxiety over our lives. Why? Because our heavenly Father is good and generous and merciful to His sons and daughters. He will provide for our needs. The more we divest ourselves of our goods and resources to help those who have none, the more we not
only turn our attention towards our neighbors, but we also make room for the providence of God to unfold in our lives. We create a space in which the Father can prove His love for us by providing for us as we help to provide the needs of our neighbor. In the practices of both fasting and almsgiving, we recognize how Pope Benedict deliberately shifts our attention away from ourselves to our neighbors. In the practice of prayer, we shift our attention away from ourselves to God: “By attentively listening to God, who continues to speak to our hearts, we nourish the itinerary of faith initiated on the day of our baptism. Prayer also allows us to gain a new concept of time: without the perspective of eternity and transcendence, in fact, time simply directs our steps towards a horizon without a future. Instead, when we pray, we find time for God, to understand that His ‘words will not pass away,’ to enter into that intimate communion with Him ‘that no one shall take from you,’ opening us to the hope that does not disappoint, eternal life.” To summarize, Pope Benedict reminds us that fasting encourages us to become more aware of the hunger and thirst in our neighbors; almsgiving provides for the needs of our neighbors, while we rely more upon God for His
providential care; finally, prayer directs our perspective beyond the present moment to hope for eternal life with God. He concludes his reflections by reminding us that “the Lenten journey, in which we are invited to contemplate the Mystery of the Cross, is meant to reproduce within us ‘the pattern of (the Lord’s) death, so as to effect a deep conversion in our lives.” Conversion involves change; change involves sacrifice; sacrifice involves the death of lesser loves in our lives so that greater loves may rise. I learned this lesson years ago when I began to sacrifice the love of food so that I could lose weight. This lesson applies to every relationship, especially the relationship with God. Lent is the time for sacrifice, to prove our love for God and improve our love for Him. And so as we approach this Lent, consider that if we make the same sacrifices that we always make year after year, we can expect to get the same results. Nothing will change. But if we desire real conversion, real growth in the spiritual life, then we must be willing to make serious sacrifices to allow our selfish loves to die, so that our love for Him will rise on Easter morning. Father Matthew Buettner is pastor of St. Dorothy Church in Lincolnton.