During Lent

Lent is not about making ourselves feel badly at any level. In fact, it’s about finding new reasons for us to feel much, much better about ourselves and each other than we normally do; and this can only happen once we try to look at the world and ourselves in a radically new way, which is to say through the eyes of God rather than through the eyes of our own entrenched prejudices, limitations, and neuroses.

For months I have been repeating to myself a very simple and revolutionary affirmation by St John of the Cross, from his Living Flame of Love, which to me says it all. If we really believe what he says and live as if it were true, then our lives would undergo the most radical conversion possible, and our hearts would continually throb with uncontainable joy. This is what the great Carmelite says: We should never forget that, if the soul searches for God, much more does her Beloved search for her. Does this not say it all? I offer it to you as a kind of Lenten mantra. Indeed, our desire for God can never outdo God’s desire for us! In fact, we can ever only love God back because God has loved us first, and we can only yearn for God because God is the source of all yearning and has created us in his own image.

Lent, in a word, is about getting rid of all the interior obstacles that block the full intensity and purity of our yearning for the Beloved and for our fraternal unity with one another in the love of Christ. Let us now, then, expand our hearts and run with renewed desire toward the embrace of the Bridegroom of the Church and of our soul.

Meditation by Father Simeon.