LENT: A Time of Grace and Renewal (IV)

Our Lent
(Link to Part I, Part II, Part III)

Aware of the grace that the season of Lent offers but at the same time conscious of the dangers that await those who desire to seriously undertake this path, our community here at the Franciscanum in Assisi each year commits to living out Lent motivated by the same passion for continuous and profound conversion that moved Saint Francis, in order to be transformed into the image Christ.

In our daily lives this desire translates into the consistent meditation on the word of God through the community prayer of the Lectio Divina, guided each week by friars who help us to pray the Word, followed by a moment of sharing together on Wednesday evening; in moments of more assiduous prayer during the week, especially on Friday with the prayer of the “CordaPia,” community prayer in our chapel during dinner time, and in the stations of the cross organized by the diocese; in exterior fasting from food, Friday dinner, and abstaining from alcohol during the week; solidarity with those who have less than us by donating that which we save through fasting to charitable activities. Naturally these community commitments do not dispense us from those personal commitments that each of us seeks to carry out faithfully, moved, however, by a communal desire to experience Christ and his love.

As good friars, we did not begin Lent with serious faces, as if entering a hard and miserable season. Rather we focused on the call we were given with the sign of the ashes at the beginning of Lent: “believe in the Gospel.” And because this is good news, it is not possible to receive the Gospel with dislike or indifference. It is true that we are dust, but we carry inside ourselves a spark of the divine, because we are shaped by the hands of God and therefore made in his image and likeness. Sin can deform us but it cannot take this gift from us. The knowledge that in this season of Lent God wants to reach out to us, especially in the experience of our fragility and sin, gives us “certain hope” that the anguish of our human limitations will soon be transformed into the joy of Easter. 

Therefore take heart, and may the Lord grant each of you a blessed Lenten journey!

fra Giovanni Nappo

LENT: A Time of Grace and Renewal (III)

Sacred Time

(Link to Part I, Part II)

But our good intentions alone are not enough to obtain this salvation. The first to make it happen is God, who comes to our aid. Of us is asked only that we have an attitude of trust and abandonment, that we surrender to his love, that we offer ourselves to his embrace by listening to his Word and by working out our conversion through the Lenten practices of fasting, alms, and prayer.

The first of the three, fasting, regards our relationship with ourselves. It has two dimensions: one, exterior, goes beyond abstaining from food to include avoiding the excessive use of certain means of communication (television, cell phones, internet…) and certain forms of entertainment, ect… A second, interior dimension is that in which our fasting becomes a “sign” of our living out the Word of God, a “sign” of our desire for purification, a “sign” of our abstaining from sin. 

Secondly, the giving of alms, closely tied to fasting, regards our relationship with others in as much as we share with our brothers that which we have. Finally, there is prayer, essentially relationship with God, an intimate and trusting dialogue that is born out of meditating on the Word, especially in community.

These activities can only be carried out on one condition: that we pass beyond the surface to the heart of the actions. Otherwise we will experience Lent as merely an exterior practice of a few extra religious signs, and not as a path of sincere conversion and profound renewal. If we lack the interior dimension, fasting becomes ostentatious hypocrisy, alms become vaunting oneself, and prayer becomes a drunkenness of empty words.