1st Sunday of Lent

1 ^st Sunday of Lent
 
I suspect a whole bunch of you have already broken your Lenten promises. Let’s see if this sounds familiar. I am going to give up something for Lent as a kind of symbolic gesture. I am going to give up my pleasure so that I can lean on God more. I don’t want to suffer too much anxiety so I will give up something that I am not too attached to. Let’s see…I could give up some food, maybe something peripheral like Greens and Brussels Sprouts. I could also give up my Snickers bars. I can’t give up my social media because that would cut me off completely. How on earth can I converse with my friends if I didn’t have my phone? I never tried actually talking to them. They are sitting right in front of me. Prefer to send them a message. Anyway the game begins. I know in a few days I will be saying, “I can’t go on. The Lenten fasts are too much to bear.” John Wayne and his heroic friends would turn in their graves if they heard me right now. Then I get a message from you to say that you just couldn’t go on. It was all too hard. That becomes it for another year. Lent is over. I get kind of mad at people. I get kind of mad at myself as well. The truth is I don’t want too much suffering or self-denial in my life. I won’t give up my comforts. I live in my comfort zone and I am unwilling to change. The one constant in all this is that I play games with God all the time. I kneel down earnestly to pray. I tell God that I am crazy about Him. I tell Him that I want to do something to show Him how much I love Him. That doesn’t last long. I justify by saying that God doesn’t mind either way because He loves me to bits anyway. I am always like a child before God. I don’t want to grow up in my faith. How do I know that? Because, the things I do in Lent I was doing them when I was a child. I never actually made a mature commitment to the God I worship. It is always a game. It is never really serious except when it is something I want, or somebody gets sick, or things like that. We wonder why our children have lost the faith. May I suggest that lots of them never had it in the first place. We never showed them heroic faith. We never put ourselves out there as role models for them. We never allowed them to minister to those less fortunate than ourselves. We never prayed with them. We dragged them to Church because that is what respectable Christians do. We drag people to Church. OK, forget about Lenten fasts. You were no good at it anyway.  How about, during Lent, this reflective season, I think about the fact that I have related to God all my life like a child. At some point I have to grow up. Let me become worthy of the relationship I have with God instead of always asking Him for favors. Let me become a wonderful role model of what a faithful person looks like. How about we stop with the games…
With love, Fr. Pat