First and Second Regeneration and the Two Purposes of Lent

[written 3/7/20]

On two occasions during Lord Jesus’ earthly pilgrimage, the Father spoke out from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son!” 1. At Christ’s Baptism. 2. At His Transfiguration. [Spanish]

Holy Baptism. One of the seven… sacraments. The sacrament of regeneration. God generated us in the first place, in the Garden of Eden. When Satan tempted us, we fell, and we became the sinful, mortal human race that we are. Then God sent His beloved Son to re-generate us.

We enter into the re-generation process through Holy Baptism. When we get baptized into Christ, everything starts fresh. Human purity restored, an open-ended friendship with God begins.

Hopefully you know, dear reader, that Lent exists primarily as the final period of preparation for adults who will be baptized during the night before Easter. In other words, Lent means, first of all: the final stage of study and purification for non-Christian adults about to become Christians.

In the original Passover, the ancient People of God passed dry-shod through the Red Sea and marched on, toward the Promised Land. During Lent we integrate the stranger and the sojourner among us into our People, the pilgrim Church, to march forward with us.

St. Thomas Aquinas

To embrace the grace of Christian faith, a soul must search itself very deeply. Someone seeking to live the life of the Church must look within. When we do that, we discover the profound need that we all have for the Savior and Redeemer of the human race.

Our bodies get thirsty and need liquid refreshment. But our souls thirst, ultimately, for God. And only Jesus Christ offers the water that truly quenches that thirst.

We need light to guide us in this world. When the sun goes down, a lot of us have a hard time driving. But, even more so, we need interior light to understand the meaning of life, and how to attain it. Only Jesus Christ shines the inner light that guides us to true peace, to heaven.

Above all, when we face reality squarely, we immediately recognize: All of us are marching inexorably toward death. No one can stop that clock from ticking. But Jesus offers the true divine life that overcomes human mortality.

So Lent exists primarily to help students of Christianity to confront all these truths of human nature, and to understand them by the light of the Gospel and the Church’s teaching. When any human being who has learned the basic of Catholicism struggles for forty days to grasp just how deeply we need the Christ, then that soul can embrace the Christian faith with real freedom and commitment at Easter.

But Lent isn’t just for un-baptized catechumens. Lent also exists to remind us already-baptized Christians about what happened to us at the font. God regenerated us there, to live as His friends, as the children of His household. We need to reach into the depths of our souls, too, to rediscover the always-new, always-fresh presence of Christ’s truth and life. When we were baptized into Him, Jesus claimed us as His forever.

We already-baptized people, as we reach into these interior depths during Lent, usually find that we need to be re-cleansed by the baptismal water. How do we do that? By going to confession! One ancient name for the sacrament of Confession is… second Baptism.

Now, speaking of second things—what about the second time the Father declared, “This is my beloved Son!” The gospel passage we read at Holy Mass this Sunday. When the Lord’s body shone with brilliant divine light, transfigured. At that moment, the human regeneration accomplished by Christ, usually invisible to our eyes, was revealed.

St. Thomas Aquinas says that Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan River was the sacrament of our first regeneration. And Christ’s Transfiguration is the sacrament of our second regeneration. That is, our bodily resurrection. When Christ comes again, in the glory He revealed at the Transfiguration, sin and Satan and death will no longer have any power over us. We will receive unending, divine bodily life. We Catholic Christians live for nothing less than that.

Fall and Remedy

[written 2/29/20]

Once every three years, we read the account of the Fall of Man at Sunday Mass, to begin Lent. It reminds us that somewhere in the murky past, we human beings had at least one moment of purity, when we enjoyed a better life–a life without all the struggles we now have. [Spanish]

In other words, we weren’t always this way. We did not always lurch through our experiences in such a Homer-Simpson-like manner. Our hearts did not always start fluttering whenever we see an ice-cream cone or a chocolate-chip cookie. We did not always have such a hard time concentrating on God’s Word, while meanwhile having such an easy time concentrating on why so-and-so should have spoken to me before speaking to that other person—how dare she snub me!

We would still live in that paradise, in that peaceful Garden of a bigger life—if only we human beings did not have such a hopeless penchant for false pride.

“Oh, okay, Mr. Serpent. You’re saying we human beings actually know better than God?  Really?  Well, we wouldn’t necessarily have thought that… But if you say so.”

False pride. True pride would have said to the serpent:  “Wait a minute. God made us. He loves us. He has the best plan. Maybe we don’t understand His rules perfectly. But we will understand, in the end. All will come clear in God’s time. Meanwhile, we trust our heavenly Father!”

But we human beings tend to confuse ourselves with God. Satan preyed on this. He tricked us into doubting the heavenly Father’s Providence. And we fell.

Death. We fell from grace in the garden, and our mortal nature kicked-in. We are dust, and unto dust we shall return.

But wait. Maybe death came as a remedy for the Fall?

We lost the peace of perfect friendship with the Creator, and so doubts and struggles beset us daily. Death means the conclusion of all this confusion and strife. Death means that our fallen-ness doesn’t last forever. The Lord has opened up a doorway that leads to something else, something other than just a life of tv, and failed diets, and paying bills, and never quite getting everything right. Death is the doorway to that different, unexplored country.

In our Sunday gospel reading, we encounter Jesus facing death squarely. He approached starvation and dehydration. But He said to the Satan: “Man lives on every word that comes from the mouth of God, and we owe our service to Him alone. We must not put His Providence to the test.”

God may test us. He may give us an unusually hard Lent. A terribly frustrating Lent. A Lent of good intentions that limp along lamely, well short of the mark.

If the Lord uses this Lent to draw us into a dark night of the soul, where we learn how weak we are, and we don’t feel any interior strength, and any good and hopeful future seems a long way off—we will praise and bless Him for it. Nothing draws us closer to God than when He demands that we live by pure faith, without any consolations in ourselves.

Each of us has his or her own particular problems. But we all have one problem in common:  We are members of the fallen human race. And the Lord offers us all a common solution to our problem:  Faith. Faith in Jesus Christ and faith in the heavenly Father Who, out of pure love, sent His eternally begotten Son to live a human life, so that we sinful human beings could get to heaven.

We want the intimacy with our Creator that we lost when our First Parents fell, the intimacy that we hope to have in the heaven that Jesus won for us. Indeed, we DO have that intimacy even now. When we let the Spirit lead us stumblingly out into the desert of our own weaknesses, into the dark cloud of fearless Christian faith.

Fifth Sunday of Lent English Video

We had some technical difficulties. Which makes this video perfect for people who tend to arrive for the 4:30 Mass at about 4:40, or for the 10:30 Mass at about 10:40 🙂

 

 

I mentioned at the Offertory: please mail in your offering, if you like. Or you can stop by the church and leave an offering in the basket. (Both churches remain open during normal Mass times, and during the week.)

Also, anyone can give on-line by visiting offertory.richmonddiocese.org. Choose either St. Francis of Assisi, Rocky Mount (556) or St. Joseph, Martinsville (572).

Deuteronomy Choice

Choose life, says the Lord. Choose to believe in God Almighty. And in His Christ, sent into the world with infinite divine love.

Choose to pray. Choose to seek wisdom from God and His saints. Do good. Avoid evil. Study God’s laws, and obey them.

Love God’s people. The people first gathered as the sons and daughters of Abraham, and now gathered as all the faithful in communion with St. Peter’s successor. Love Holy Mother Church, in other words. Never betray her or do violence to her.

Humble yourself in order to exalt yourself. God didn’t make no dummies, and He didn’t make no trash. He has a plan for peace and true happiness for all of us. But we can only know that plan one little step at a time. We don’t have infinite, providential minds. We’re no dummies, but the smartest thing we can do is: obey God. Acknowledge Him; revere Him; kiss His earth for His sake; submit to Him.

…I have been reading one book after another about climbing Mount Everest. I bring this up because we have begun to climb spiritually, up the ‘mountain’ of Easter.

One lesson of the books I have read about climbing Everest: You can’t fight with the mountain. Mount Everest will win. You must submit completely to the entire reality determined by the mountain itself.

Which means: Even though you may have dumped tens of thousands of dollars in to your Everest expedition, you might get to the top. And you might not.

The weather might simply refuse to co-operate. Your own body might react to the thin atmosphere in such a way that summiting proves simply impossible for you. Your teammates might have health problems that make the final ascent impossible.

In other words: A greater power than you will determine whether or not you reach the top. Not you. If you become willful about summiting, what may very well happen to you? RIP.

So, dear brothers and sisters: Let’s kiss God’s earth at the bottom of the mountain of Easter. Let’s look up at God—the God-man, crucified and risen from the dead, ascended on high. Let’s look up at Him and say: Lord, Thy will be done.

Hidden in the Dust

Anyone ever looked out from Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee? It’s the southwestern-most ridge of the Appalachians, about the same latitude as the southern end of the Appalachian Trail.

You look down on the Tennessee River winding its way through the valley below. Dramatic history lies hidden in the soil, so to speak.

Like the decisive military action of the Civil War. The Confederates had put the Federal Army of the Cumberland on its heels here, in the fall of 1863. The Union soldiers in Chattanooga were cut-off and starving. But General Ulysses Grant found a way to get supplies into the besieged city, by stealth and stratagem.

The Union troops survived, and then marched toward Atlanta.

Or, buried even deeper in the dust of the valley: the archaeological remnants of other ancient civilizations that once lived and thrived here. There’s a simple memorial to the Cherokee Trail of Tears in downtown Chattanooga: A set of stone steps that leads… into the river.

Cherokee leader John Ross

Remember, man, that you are dust.

All this history, and more, lies hidden in the dust, so to speak, of one Appalachian valley. What lies hidden in us? In the dust that we are?

For our sake God made His Christ to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

What lies hidden in our mortal flesh? Nothing less than this: the eternal God has called us to be His beloved children forever. We have a vocation unto undying life, the unending life of God’s powerful love. This mystery of life lies hidden in our now-mortal flesh.

Which means we have a Passover to celebrate. Our brother in this mortal flesh, Jesus Christ, has passed over from the valley of tears into the Kingdom of Light. Our life makes sense when we recognize it as a pilgrimage towards that Passover, Christ’s Passover.

In fact, that’s the only way that human life makes sense. Without Christ, we die meaninglessly on a big rock hurtling around a minor star in a vast, empty universe. With Christ: we march toward life. In Him, God Himself accepted our human death, in order to turn death into a door. The door that leads to the everlasting life of God.

So let’s prepare ourselves to celebrate Christ’s Passover. It’s in… how many days? Let’s pray, fast, and give alms in secret for forty days. Because what lies hidden in this mortal dust of ours is: life.

Supernatural Insights

Do you reject Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises? Do you believe in Almighty God, in His Son Jesus Christ Who died and rose from the dead, in His Holy Spirit, and in His Church? [Spanish]

Macbeth

Baptismal promises. They involve a decision, a choice. The fundamental choice of life: to reject the seduction of short-term satisfaction through sin and to embrace the call of God. To offer our lives in sacrifice to the Father, as Jesus did on the cross. To pass over to eternal life, by living for God.

We choose in response to God’s choice. As St. Paul puts it in our second reading at Holy Mass on Sunday, we are God’s “chosen ones.” He chose us for eternal life even before the foundation of the world. He inscribed our names in His Son’s Sacred Heart, numbering us among His adopted children.

Hopefully everyone knows the main reason we have the season of Lent: For the final preparation of adults preparing for baptism. During these six weeks, they dedicate themselves to an especially intense spiritual life, as the day when they will become Christians approaches. Let’s make sure we pray hard for them.

Many of us became Christians while we were still infants, carried to the baptismal font by our parents. They, with our godparents, made the baptismal promises that day. They chose on our behalf to reject sin and live for God.

Holy Mother Church gives us already-baptized people the forty days of Lent to renew the baptismal choice and make it more and more our own. After all, it takes a lifetime for anyone truly to choose God. The day of baptism comes and goes quickly, but we only really finish making our baptismal promises at the moment of death. In the meantime, we work on deepening our rejection of Satan and our faith in God.

Perhaps this is one reason why the Church always reads the account of the Transfiguration near the beginning of Lent. The main reason, of course, is: Christ let Peter, James, and John see His divine glory in order to prepare them for His Passion and death. Lent prepares us for the same thing.

But there’s more. Lord Jesus allowed Peter, James, and John, to see what we normally cannot see here on earth. In heaven, the saints see what Peter, James, and John saw on Mount Tabor. But as we Christians make our pilgrim way through life, we must have faith that Jesus of Nazareth is God; we believe that He is.

For a moment, though, these three chosen Apostles saw. They saw the divinity of the Eternal Word made man. That was an extraordinary gift of insight, to be sure. But we, too, share in Peter, James, and John’s special vision of Christ in our own way. Christian faith gives us supernatural insight into the workings of divine Providence. We can learn to recognize temptations when they come our way, and to recognize the moments when God embraces us with His true love. Even though these two realities often wear disguises.

Anyone familiar with William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth? It involves a perfect example of what I mean. Early in the play, Macbeth thinks that Fate is “blessing” him with the opportunity to sit on the throne of Scotland. He thinks that the doors of ambition open before him because some higher power is working for his benefit. But Macbeth learns, in the the end, that an evil power has actually seduced him. Macbeth becomes king, but to his utter ruin. It costs him his happiness, his life, his soul.

May keeping Lent help us to put that in reverse. May we learn to see a temptation when it comes our way, no matter how shiny and attractive it may be. And may we learn to embrace with joy whatever little share in His Cross the good Lord gives us. Because to share in Christ’s cross is the greatest blessing we can receive in this pilgrim life.

Turning Our Backs on the Beloved World

Our first reading at Sunday Mass reminds us about the covenant between God and Noah after the ancient flood.  As we read in Genesis, when God Almighty had decided to flood the earth completely, He did it with divine sadness.  He had made the world to be beautiful.  But Satan had befouled creation with so much sin and degradation that only a fresh start could get things back on-track. [SPANISH]

The flood didn’t mean the end of everything.  The same human race that God had created originally, and the same animals–all would survive, and provide a new beginning, after the flood.  But only one ark-full.  One isolated, solitary ark floating on the surface of an endless sea.

Now, we Catholics love the world.  We do not despise anything that God has made.  We know that He made everything to thrive, to flourish.

God made this cosmos—gave it a beginning, but not an end.  He made the world to endure forever, as an eternal temple of His light.  He even made the devil good, beautiful, powerful, vastly intelligent. God made Lucifer not for malice, but for love.

Lucifer, however, willed otherwise.  He willed destruction.  He wills the degradation of the world. And the devil has such skill in wreaking havoc that the world, which we love, which belongs to eternity—this world, at one point, justly got submerged under an endless sea.  God covered the earth with enough water to drown everyone and everything that didn’t make it onto the ark.  Not because God hated what He made, but because Satan had done his evil work so well.  All of the devil’s destruction had to be destroyed, in order that the world could thrive again. So the flood came.

Now, all of this happened to foreshadow of the mystery of Christ, and of Baptism into Christ. To begin Lent, we have to ask the question:  Where do we find the Kingdom of God?  In this world, or in another world?  Here, or somewhere else?

Yes.

The Lord Jesus went out into the ark of total solitude for 40 days.  He turned His back on the world, as if it were covered with an endless sea of water. We Catholics follow Christ into that ark of Lenten solitude, into the ark of self-denial.  We turn our backs on things like ice-cream and champagne.  We get into the ark of Lenten separation from the normal comforts of this earth.

The ark doesn’t have wifi or cable.  The berths on the ark do not have featherbeds.  But our Lenten observances do not involve self-loathing, nor world-hating.  We don’t hate ice-cream or champagne.  At least I don’t.  We don’t hate the world.  We don’t hate ourselves.

But the fact of the matter is:  The Enemy has enough power to just about ruin the world.  He has enough power to just about ruin us.  And He’s clever enough to ruin us with things so apparently innocuous as tvs, phones, ice-cream cones, donuts.

We do not undertake our Lenten penances with glee.  God did not gleefully flood the earth in the days of Noah.  God wouldn’t have flooded the earth at all, except He knew that, after forty days and forty nights of endless rain, He would set the rainbow in the clouds again.  Everything would start fresh and happy, with all the creatures from the ark standing on the fertile ground.  Birds singing and flowers starting to grow, like they had back in the Garden of Eden.

We undertake our Lenten penances because we love ourselves enough to hate how weak we can be.  We love the world enough to hate how it can lead us to make big mistakes in it. The world needs a big wash-down.  We need a big wash-down.

The world will never grow into the Kingdom of God, unless we love it enough to turn our backs on it for 40 days.  And we ourselves won’t make it to the divine Kingdom that this world will one day be, unless we deny ourselves and take up our crosses during Lent.  With the same kind of loving courage that led the Lord Jesus out into the desert.

More on the Essential Fact

At daily Mass on Saturday, the day before the third Sunday of Lent, we will read the Parable of the Prodigal Son. After that: only three weeks till Palm Sunday!

Let’s focus on this: Christ came to conquer death. To die as a man and rise again as a man. CNN can come and go; brackets can get filled out and busted. But this is the essential fact. Jesus said, “In My Father’s house, there are many dwelling places.” We live a mortal life in a sinful world, to be sure. But, fundamentally, we live in the Father’s house. And each of us has his or her own place in that house, no matter what—because of Christ’s conquest of death.

We read in the gospel at today’s Mass that Lazarus would gladly have eaten the scraps that fell from Dives’ table. Lazarus did not demand a widescreen hd smart tv. Lazarus did not style himself as some kind of high-rolling tycoon. He simply wanted his just portion of food.

But he did not get it. Because Dives did style himself a high-rolling tycoon and did demand a widescreen hd smart tv and did not concern himself with his fellowman.

Then death came for them both. And with death came justice.

Tomorrow at Holy Mass we will read a parable about how the Father built a fruitful vineyard with plenty of dwelling places, for his grapes to grow and for His children to reap the fruits. He sent His Son to collect His just portion. ( I guess the just portion of the Creator can only be our peaceful, worshipful love, right?) But they killed the Son and heir.

See the picture here? The Father wills peace, harmony, human co-operation. The Father wills the fruitfulness of His children. The Father reigns over a kingdom not of scarcity, nor of selfish luxury—but of tranquil, beautiful sufficiency for everyone. The Son fulfills the will of the Father perfectly. And, in this fallen world, it leads to His death.

When rich Dives cried out from hell, begging Abraham to send someone back from the dead to teach the world a lesson, Abraham demurred. ‘God already tried to teach the world a lesson! Didn’t He form a covenant and seal it with His life-giving love? How hard is it to obey the Ten Commandments? No more warnings.’

But, as we will read Saturday: Even without the warning that Dives begged Abraham to send, something managed to get through to the prodigal son. Something penetrated his soul, as he gazed upon the pig-slop that he wished he could feed himself upon. He languished in the muck, in this fallen world. But, somehow, he found a way to stand on the stone which the builders rejected. The stone which the builders rejected is Christ, the Prince of Peace, Who came seated on a donkey into Jerusalem, prepared to reign with love. But they rejected Him and killed Him.

The prodigal son managed to stand on that stone somehow, and he thought to himself, “In my father’s house, there are many dwelling places! There’s one for me.” And the father said, “This son of mine was dead, but now he lives!”

Christ conquered death. He conquered death with something. It’s the same mysterious something that somehow moved the heart of the prodigal son towards the truth of God.

Christ conquered death with the very life that the Father freely wills to give us. Christ conquered death with the Father’s gift of life. Abraham would not send a warning back from beyond the grave. But Christ did not hesitate to return from the grave with a gift. The gift of the fruitful life of the eternal springtime of God.

First and Second Regeneration

Purim moon tonight. One more cycle to the holy Pasch.

On two occasions during Lord Jesus’ earthly life, the Father spoke out from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved Son!” At Christ’s Baptism. And at His Transfiguration.

Holy Baptism. One of the seven… sacraments. The sacrament of regeneration. God generated us in the first place, in the Garden of Eden. When Satan tempted us, we fell, and we became the sinful, mortal human race that we are. Then God sent His beloved Son to re-generate us.

We enter into the re-generation process through Holy Baptism. When we get baptized into Christ, everything starts fresh–human purity restored, an open-ended friendship with God begins.

You know that Lent exists primarily as the final period of preparation for adults who will be baptized during the night before Easter. Lent primarily means the final stage of study and purification for non-Christians about to become Christians. The ancient People of God passed dry-shod through the Red Sea and marched on, toward the Promised Land; Lent exists primarily for us to integrate the stranger and the sojourner among us into our nation, the pilgrim Church.

Lent also exists to remind us already-baptized Christians about what happened to us at the font. God regenerated us there, to live as His friends, as the children of His household. We need to reach into the depths of our souls to rediscover the always-new, always-fresh presence of Christ’s truth and life. When we were baptized into Him, Jesus claimed us as His forever.

We already-baptized people, as we reach into these lovely interior depths during Lent, usually find that we need to be re-cleansed by the baptismal water. And that’s as easy as… going to confession! One ancient name for the sacrament of Confession is… second Baptism.

But, speaking of second things—what about the second time the Father declared, “This is my beloved Son!” The gospel we read at Holy Mass every second Sunday of Lent. When the Lord’s body shone with brilliant divine light, transfigured. At that moment, the human regeneration accomplished by Christ, usually invisible to our eyes, was revealed.

St. Thomas Aquinas says that Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan River was the sacrament of our first regeneration. And Christ’s Transfiguration is the sacrament of our second regeneration. Our bodily resurrection. When Christ comes again, in the glory He revealed at the Transfiguration, sin and Satan and death will no longer have any power over us. According to God’s own design, we will shine then like the stars in the sky.

First Sunday of Lent Homily, Lectionary Year A

—

Once every three years, we read the account of the Fall of Man at Sunday Mass.  To begin Lent.  We remember that somewhere in the murky past, we human beings had at least one moment of purity, when we enjoyed a better life–a life without all the struggles we now have.

We weren’t always this way.  We did not always lurch through our experiences in such a Homer-Simpson-like manner.  Our hearts did not always start fluttering whenever we see a frozen yogurt machine or a chocolate-chip cookie.  We did not always have such a hard time concentrating on God’s Word, while meanwhile having such an easy time concentrating on why so-and-so should have spoken to me before speaking to that other person—how dare she snub me!

We would still live in that paradise, in that peaceful Garden of a bigger life—if only we human beings did not have such a hopeless penchant for false pride.

“Oh, okay, Mr. Serpent!  You’re saying we human beings actually know better than God?  Really?  Well, we wouldn’t necessarily have thought that…  But if you say so.”

False pride.  True pride would have said to the serpent:  “Wait a minute.  God made us.  He loves us.  He has the best plan.  Maybe we don’t understand His rules perfectly.  But we will understand, in the end.  All will come clear in God’s time.  Meanwhile, we trust our heavenly Father!”

But:  We human beings tend to confuse ourselves with God.  Satan preyed on this.  He tricked us into doubting the heavenly Father’s Providence.  And we fell.

A question:  We know from experience what it’s like to live now after the Fall of Man.  But how could we possibly know anything about what human life would have been like before the Fall?  How can we say what kind of life Adam and Eve had, before they ate the fateful apple?

Anybody know the answer?  In the fullness of time, the un-fallen Eve and the un-fallen Adam gave us a window into what our life was originally meant to be like.  Who brought the Garden of Eden back to the earth?  The Blessed Mother and her Son. Lord Jesus and the Blessed Virgin enjoyed perfect intimacy with the Creator. That intimacy teaches us about what life was like in the Garden of Eden. And, of course, it teaches us about heaven, too.

Question 2:  Death.  We fell from grace in the garden, and our mortal nature kicked-in. We are dust, and unto dust we shall return.  Did God punish us by allowing this?

Well, our First Parents succumbed to false pride.  Therefore, all their children inherit human flesh bearing the humiliating mark of inevitable death.  Sounds like punishment.

But maybe death came as a remedy for the Fall?  We lost the peace of perfect friendship with the Creator, and so this pilgrimage comes with daily doubts and struggles.  Death means the end of all this confusion and strife, the human agony that the Fall has caused.  Death means that our “fallen-ness” doesn’t last forever.  Death means the Lord has opened up a doorway that leads to something else, something other than just a life of tv, and failed diets, and paying bills, and never quite getting everything right.

The intimacy of Jesus with the Father.  The hungry man Who feeds on God’s truth says to the tempting devil, “Man lives on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  The perfectly free, perfectly self-possessed man, united with the Creator, says to the tempter, “We owe our service to God alone, and we must not put His Providence to the test.”

Now, God may test us.  He may give us an unusually hard Lent.  A terribly frustrating Lent.  A Lent of good intentions that limp along lamely, well short of the mark.  If such be the Lent that the Lord has a mind to give us, so be it.  We will trust in His love and His mercy.  We will try to die to our own false pride.

If the Lord uses this Lent to draw us into a dark night of the soul, and we don’t feel His presence, and any good and hopeful future seems a long way off—we will praise and bless Him for it.  Nothing draws us closer to God than when He demands that we live by pure faith, without any consolations in this world.

Each of us has his or her own particular problems.  But we all have one problem in common:  We are members of the fallen human race.  And the Lord offers us all a common solution to our problem:  Faith.  Faith in Jesus Christ and faith in the heavenly Father Who, out of pure love, sent His eternally begotten Son to live a human life, so that we sinful human beings could get to heaven.

We want the intimacy with our Creator that we lost when our First Parents fell, the intimacy that we hope to have in the heaven that Jesus won for us. Indeed, we do have that intimacy even now—when the Spirit leads us stumblingly out into the desert, into the dark cloud of pure Christian faith.