Happy Valentine's Day everyone! That's probably not what you were expecting me to say, it's kind of a weird combination of Holidays, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, somewhat in conflict even.
The world tells us to celebrate our love with chocolate and sweets, fancy meals and flowers, while our Church asks us to abstain from meat and fast from food.
On the other hand they go together perfectly… today is the kickoff of our 40 day Preparation period to celebrate the greatest love story ever told, Jesus’s suffering, death and Resurrection for love of us, His unconditional love for us.
Also, if I could pick one symbol for Valentines day, I’d pick a “heart,” and today in our readings the image of a heart is used several times - listen again to the beginning of the first reading: “Even now, says the Lord,/ return to me with your whole heart,/ with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;/ Rend your hearts, not your garments,/ and return to the Lord, your God./ For gracious and merciful is He,/ slow to anger, rich in kindness,/ and relenting in punishment.”
This is Our God, who sees our heart and loves us so much, “gracious and merciful is He, slow to anger, rich in kindness,” and He proves that by His sacrifice on the cross for love of us.
Our Sacrifice shows our love right? Any sacrifice we make… time, money, any effort. We sacrifice for what we love. Or whatever we are willing to sacrifice the most in our lives is probably what we love the most. Think about it.
So our Church takes these ashes and holds them in front of us, puts them on our heads saying one of two things, either:
“Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
Or:
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
With both statements, the Church is encouraging us to consider our life choices.
The first is basically saying “if you aren't living consciously, actively in the Good News, truly living the Gospel message of Jesus, it's time to change your ways.” The second one says, “hey, you are going to die at some point, are you living for your eternal reality of God’s love or just focusing on the earthly loves and pleasures?”
Both statements help us to consider what we love the most, what we are willing to sacrifice for in our lives, and encourage us to “be reconciled to God.”
Ash Wednesday is a wake up call. Lent is an “acceptable time” to wake up and make any changes, lest we get complacent - it is way too easy to get complacent and take God’s love for granted.
We often get complacent in our relationships. Think of dating relationships, the first time you go out, or the first time you go to a big dance, you get all cleaned up and try really hard to look good and attractive. But then, after a while, we grow complacent, we take our relationship for granted, we don’t try as hard to get all cleaned up or anything.
The purpose of Lent is to cleanse our hearts and renew our relationship with God. In our psalm today we heard, “A clean heart create for me, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me. Cast me not out from your presence, and your Holy Spirit take not from me.”
“A clean heart create for me…” As I told the kids at Our Lady last week, we know how to clean our hands, we know how to clean our teeth. But our hearts??
The church gives us the formula to clean our heart… the way we clean our heart is to remove that which is unclean, any obstacles to our love of God, and replace it with something better, through Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving.
Fasting and Almsgiving remove obstacles, Prayer replaces it. The first two remove the comfort and pleasures of this earthly life that we get so attached to, making us complacent about our relationship with God, the prayer helps us to focus on our eternal life and increases God’s presence within us.
God never takes away His Holy Spirit, we just tend to drown the Holy Spirit’s voice out with all of our earthly loves and pursuits.
I tend to get overzealous at the start of Lent and try to do a lot of things, but my advice is to just pick one thing to remove and one thing to replace it with, and do it really well. Remove and replace.
Make good use of this acceptable time to prepare your hearts for the holiest days of the year. God loves us and gives the formula to us to grow in a deeper relationship with Him, we have only to choose to live in His unconditional love here and now, cleansing our hearts to prepare to meet Him.