Reflection for the fifth week of Lent

We are near the end of our Lenten journey in the 5th week of Lent. This week I am busy several evenings helping out at different parishes in the Jackson metro area to hear confessions. Yesterday, I went out to the state correctional facility in Pearl to celebrate Mass with the male and female inmates there. Thursday evening, I will be attending the annual Pro-Life Mississippi with Bishop Kopacz and with some other members of our chancery staff team. Yes, it is a busy week during Lent as we are getting ready for Palm Sunday this weekend and for our Holy Week liturgies.

As you all know, I have been trying to address the theme of gratitude in homilies and reflections during the season of Lent. I have been posting gratitude quotes each day during the season of Lent to my personal Facebook page and to our parish’s Facebook page. Ever since I prayed the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola in the summer of 2019 and learned that Ignatius viewed ingratitude as the worst sin and at the heart of all sin, I have viewed gratitude differently as an essential part of my spirituality. I am looking at the gratitude quote I am posting today on my Facebook Page from the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, who lived a century before Christ. Cicero's thoughts on gratitude very much echo what St Ignatius of Loyola stated: “A grateful heart is not only the greatest virtue, it is the parent of all the other virtues.”

I recently wrote a letter to one of my professors in seminary, the Spanish professor there, who had a great impact on me. She is a consecrated virgin and she is the director of a spiritual direction center in the Milwaukee area. In the letter, I expressed to her my gratitude for the way she impacted my life and my discernment while I was a seminarian in Milwaukee at the Sacred Heart School of Theology studying to be a priest for our Diocese. We live in a society where gratitude is no longer expressed very often. I truly believe that if we are more aware of our blessings and adopt a stance of gratitude in our lives, gratitude will infuse our very being and become a bigger part of the way we view life.

I will leave you with the Anima Christi prayer. Although it was probably not originally written by St Ignatius of Loyola, it is very much associated with his spiritual exercises and appears at the beginning of those exercises. It is a very appropriate prayer as we get ready for our commemoration of Holy Week:

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
 Body of Christ, save me. 
Blood of Christ, inebriate me. 
Water from the side of Christ, wash me. 
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
 O Good Jesus, hear me.
 Within your wounds hide me.
 Permit me not to be separated from you.
 From the wicked foe, defend me.
 At the hour of my death, call me 
and bid me come to you,
 that with your saints, I may praise you for ever and ever. Amen.

Have a blessed week everyone. Father Lincoln.