Lent is…a
time of grace, a time for letting God gaze upon us with love and in this
way change our lives. We were put in this world to go from ashes to life.
So, let us not turn our hopes and God’s dream for us into powder and ashes. Let
us not grow resigned. You may ask: “How can I trust? The world is falling to
pieces, fear is growing, there is so much malice all around us, society is
becoming less and less Christian…” Don’t you believe that God can transform our
dust into glory?
All
around us, we see the dust of death. Lives reduced to ashes. Rubble,
destruction, war. The lives of unwelcomed innocents, the lives of the excluded
poor, the lives of the abandoned elderly. We continue to destroy ourselves, to
return to ashes and dust. And how much dust there is in our relationships! Look
at our homes and families: our quarrels, our inability to resolve conflicts,
our unwillingness to apologize, to forgive, to start over, while at the same
time insisting on our own freedom and our rights! All this dust that besmirches
our love and mars our life. Even in the Church, the house of God, we have let
so much dust gather, the dust of worldliness. Let us look inside, into our
hearts…
Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpts from a homily by Pope Francis, 2020.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpts from a homily by Pope Francis, 2020.
