Lent Gets Personal

I Love Lent!

As a Catholic, I really love all these opportunities to celebrate the cycling of the seasons of life throughout the year. Christmas is jubilantly colorful. Easter is solemnly joyful. Ordinary Time is, well, peacefully ordinary and serene. I love the feast days for they unite us as one Church, one family of God, in union with the Saints. Christmas, Easter, and the other feast days can be very community-oriented celebrations that echo our interconnectedness and all these outward projections of our humanity. And that is all good and something to be appreciated and loved.

But there is something about the season of Lent. There is that profound sense of introspection and soul-searching, an opportunity to turn inward and reflect on our personal relationship with God. The ashes we get on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday remind us of our humanity as the priest says: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Two things come to my mind as I stand in line to receive the ashes on my forehead: humility and gratefulness. Humbled for the reminder that life passes away on earth. Humbled that there are things we do in life that take us away from God's grace. Humbled that, through Lent, we have the opportunity to work our way back to God. Grateful that, through God’s grace, we love and are loved. Grateful that Jesus Christ is with me on this journey.

How awesome it is to see fellow Catholics with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesdays. There is something about the universality of the celebrations of these liturgical feasts. Something binding- to God and to one another as a family of God- that reminds us that we are not alone. The next 40 days of Lent can get very personal and we might feel like we are alone but we are not. We are all on this journey together with each other and with Christ.

Have a joy-filled Lent!