Dear Friends,
I hope you will join me on Sunday and Monday evening at 7:00 for our Cabrini Lenten Mission here at the church with Steve Angrisano. He is widely known in the Omaha area and is a popular Christian speaker. Come and join your fellow parishioners for two spirit-filled evenings.
Some of you have asked about the photos we placed on the church walls during the Lenten Season. We used them several years ago and the Liturgy Committee thought it would be helpful for our parishioner’s Lenten journey to bring them out again. Some may ask, why these four things?
At one point in his ministry, Jesus specifies three clear components to discipleship: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Knowing everything else that Jesus teaches, it is not difficult for us to add love to that list. It is important for us to understand these components in the way that Jesus did. For Jesus, prayer was not simply going to your room and praying in private, but also keeping the commandments and praying in common with others. For Jesus, fasting meant more than eating lightly or skipping a meal, it also included a simplicity of living that brought joy to life. For Jesus, almsgiving was more than an extra donation during Lent, but included the practices of justice as well as charity. And love, well of course, that is more than loving friends and family, it includes those we do not like and even our enemies.
These four are not elements of following Jesus that we can choose or not choose. They are in the mind of Jesus an essential part of the practice of following His way. Back when I was in the seminary (long ago now), one of the great thinkers, Fr. Bernard Lonergan, tried to set out the criteria to judge a true religious conversion. His list included six dimensions: Religious, theistic, Christological, ecclesial, moral and intellectual. With those big theological words, he was saying that when we are converted to Jesus it involves every dimension of our life. It involves our intellect and our body, our heart and our will, our time and our treasure.
For Jesus, to love God and to love our neighbor cannot be separated. Loving our neighbor cannot only be a pious thought. Our actions must live out our love of neighbor. One of the things our present age often chooses is to be a follower of Jesus without belonging to a community of faith. We want God, but we do not want to find God in the way that Jesus teaches. We want to do it by ourselves and in our own way. Yet, the search for God is not a private affair where I simply examine my own heart. It involves the messy reality of a human community that has a history we may not always like.
Lent is a time where we commit to trying again to live the way of Jesus. Perhaps we cannot change ourselves all at once. However, if we try to live and love differently, in simple, small ways, perhaps we will find ourselves more like Jesus when we arrive at the Easter celebrations.
Peace,
Fr. Damian