March 13, 2025
Isn't Lent a wonderful time for God to regain his rightful place in our lives, that is to say, the entire place? God is a jealous God: he wants everything, and for that, he wants us to be poor. He wants to make us beggars who ask for his love. That is why Christ, as we see in the Gospel of the cleansing of the Temple, drives away with strokes of the whip all that is too human, all that is too “us”, the herds of oxen and sheep that encumber us when we try to pray. stripping away is actually a mercy.
And we can cooperate in this great inner cleansing! The Holy Spirit leaves it up to us to do what is in our power to purify our hearts, to rectify our intelligence and our will and to make our bodies an orderly dwelling place to receive the Eucharist.
But how can we do this? We must worship, that is to say, place ourselves radically and truly before the love of the Father who is currently creating our soul, of the Son who saved us so freely, of the Holy Spirit who renews everything in us. Seven times a day during Lent, I pause for a moment, on my knees if possible; I place myself once again before the “current” action of God in me, beside which everything else is nothing, however noisy and cumbersome it may be. I accept my lowliness, my dependence; I place myself entirely in God's hands, with trust. Then, little by little, I rediscover the profound meaning of my whole life: created and recreated by God, I am made to return to him.
