Bulletin Reflection - St Jude Catholic Church - First Sunday of Lent - 1 March 2020

It is the first weekend of the Lenten season, a liturgical season that I look forward to each year.  We have celebrated Ash Wednesday, receiving a smudge of ash on our foreheads, as it was proclaimed to us: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”  We have already had our first fish fry and our first stations of the cross. 

With our theme of forgiveness this year, I read the following in a book on forgiveness and the sacrament of reconciliation for teens: “The sacrament of reconciliation is one of the most powerful gifts that we can accept in our lives.  The sacrament has the power to transform our lives and make us so full of joy.  It can also transform the Church and society.  If we really understand and accept the gift of the sacrament of reconciliation from God, we will be changed.”   We will have our Lenten reconciliation service this Monday, from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm.  We will have four priests here to hear confessions.  We invite all of you to join us for this meaningful sacrament of forgiveness and healing. In thinking of the sacrament of reconciliation, I think of this quote from C S Lewis: "To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”  I also think of how Pope Francis states that this sacrament is to enrich humanity with a liberating encounter with God, to educate us in mercy, to not exclude but rather to include the just obligations for the wrongs we have committed. 

As we begin our Lenten journey, we are called to not only forgiveness, but also to the three important Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  We are to seek out God on our Lenten journey, but we are not to seek out God as we would seek a lost object, according to Thomas Merton.  To seek God is to recognize the ways he is already present in our hearts, the ways he is already present in the reality of the world around us.  To seek out God is to recognize him in the Lenten disciplines we promise to follow during these weeks of this holy season.  May God bless all of you on your Lenten journey.