The Season of Lent

By TOM DENNEHY

Lent is a period of preparation for the most holy and most important time in our Church calendarthe celebration of Easter which celebrates the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Ash Wednesday, celebrated this year on March 5th, marks the beginning of Lent. On this day, blessed ashes were placed on our foreheads reminding us of the brevity of life and the good news of the Gospel.

Lent is a period of forty days, excluding Sundays, when we prepare to celebrate the sacred feast of Easter. It echoes the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the desert, enduring the temptation of Satan, according to the Gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke before beginning His public ministry.

How do we prepare:

The Church invites us to prepare for Easter in an activity orientated fashion-. We are invited to Pray, Fast and to Give Alms.

Prayer - The raising up of the mind and heart to God. In the course of our day we are preoccupied with our jobs, our families and the daily pressures we encounter. The trouble is that in our busy lives, we rarely raise our minds and hearts to God. Prayer is a friendship with God where we cultivate a relationship with Him. God needs to be the central focus of our lives. Prayer should be tuning into our relationship with God. So during Lent we are asked to pray more intently. The best way to improve our prayer is to give it more time. In order to cultivate a friendship with someone we need to spend time with that person and it is the same with Jesus. So during Lent let us take time to spend in prayer.

• The Rosary is the most effective way to pray and one which we are all familiar with and your life will definitely change for the better. If you take the time to pray it every day, you will see miracles happening in your lives.

• Meditation is a good way to focus our minds and hearts on God as we ask Him to guide us to live our daily lives in a Christian way. We may meditate on the gospel readings of the day.

• Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament is a powerful hour of uninterrupted prayer with Jesus.

• Pray the Stations of the Cross meditating on the passion of Jesus. It is a great preparation for Easter.

• There are several short prayers to say during the course of your day, for example, “O Jesus I surrender myself to you, take care of everything.”

• The Holy Mass is our greatest prayer – let us make a commitment to attend Mass as often as we can during Lent.

Fasting - is a great discipline to practise in our lives. It gives us control of our desires so that our deeper hungers can emerge. It is a great aid to prayer and Our Lady asks us specifically to fast and pray for peace in our world. Fasting helps us control the physical desires whish may have taken over our lives such as addiction to alcohol, food, shopping or spending too much time on social media.

When we refrain from something we desire we become more conscious of it. It makes us more aware of our dependence on it and more aware of our vulnerability and our need for God’s help.

Fasting and Repentance is about changing our lives, giving God access to our hearts and turning away from our selfish and materialistic ways and putting ourselves in a close relationship with God.

We need the help of the Holy Spirit as we need God’s grace to do all the things we plan to do during Lent. It is often a good time to renew our New Year resolutions.

Alms Giving:

Alms giving often goes hand in hand with fasting; it is motivated by love of neighbour, charitably giving to the poor.

The Bible tells us we should give ten per cent of our income to the poor and worthy causes.

In our world today we have such great need for people to give generously. We have so many great organizations at home and abroad who do amazing work caring for war and famine situations around the world. During Lent we should make a special effort to give generously to anyone who asks for our help.

The most important thing is that we do not waste the opportunity to spend our Lenten time preparing for The Sacred Season and on Easter Sunday morning, we can joyfully sing “Alleluia, He has risen, Alleluia”.