VATICAN - Benedict XVI presides First Station of Lent on the Aventine Hill: “prayer of supplication filled with hope is the leit motiv of Lent, and enables us to experience God, as our only anchor of salvation”

Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “At the beginning of this penitential itinerary I would like to reflect briefly on prayer and suffering as qualifying aspects of the Liturgical Season of Lent”: with these words the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI began his homily at Mass celebrated in the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill, in Rome, on Ash Wednesday February 6, during which there was the blessing and imposition of ashes. Before the Mass the Pope led a penitential procession of Cardinals, Bishops, Benedictine Monks, a few Dominican Fathers and lay people from the Church of Sant’Anselmo to the Basilica of Santa Sabina.
“Prayer nourishes hope since nothing more than praying with faith expresses the reality of God in our life. Even in the solitude of a hard trial, nothing and no one can stop me from turning to the Father, ‘in secret' in my heart, where He alone ‘sees’, as Jesus says in the Gospel” the Pope said in his homily mentioning two moments of Jesus' earthly life - the forty days in the desert, on which the season of Lent is modelled, and the agony in the Garden of Gethsemany - which were essentially moments of prayer. “Solitary prayer with the Father, heart to heart, in the desert, prayer filled with 'mortal anguish' in the Garden of Olives. But on both occasions, it is by praying that Christ unmasks the deceit of the tempter and defeats him”.
On the cross Christ's prayer reaches its apex: in those last words “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" “Christ makes his own the invocation of one besieged without escape by enemies who has only God to turn to and, beyond any human possibility, He experiences God's grace and salvation… Jesus makes his own this cry of humanity which suffers because of the apparent absence of God and he carries this cry to the heart of the Father. In this way, praying in this ultimate solitude together with humanity, He opens for us the Heart of God … Therefore prayer of supplication filled with hope is the leit motiv of Lent, and enables us to experience God as our only anchor of salvation”. The Pope then underlined that “prayer is a melting pot in which our expectations and aspirations are exposed to the light of God's Word”, and that without the dimension of prayer, “the human 'I' closes in on itself, and conscience, which should be the echo of the voice of God, risks being reduced to a reflection of 'I', so that interior colloquium becomes a monologue giving rise to endless self-justification. Prayer, therefore, is a guarantee of opening to others: those who make themselves free for God and his demands, opens at the same time to others, to the brother or sister who knocks at the door of our heart asking to be heard, to receive attention, sometimes correction, but always with fraternal charity. True prayer is never egocentric it is always centred on God… True prayer is the engine of the world, because it keeps us open to God. This is why without prayer there can be no hope, only delusion”.
Fasting and almsgiving, closely connected with prayer, can be considered places in which to learn and to exercise Christian hope. “Thanks to a combination of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, Lent trains Christians to be men and women of hope, following the example of the Saints”.
With regard to the value of suffering, Benedict XVI said “Easter, to which Lent tends, is the mystery which gives meaning to human suffering … The Lenten journey therefore, since it glows with Easter light, helps us relive what took place in the human-divine heart of Christ as he went up to Jerusalem for the last time, to offer himself in expiation … Christ's suffering is in fact permeated with the light of love: the love of the Father who allows his Son to go with trust to his last ‘baptism’, as he describes the culmination of his mission. Jesus received that baptism of pain and love, for us, for all humanity. He suffered for truth and justice, bringing into human history the gospel of suffering which is the other face of the gospel of love”.
The history of the Church, Pope Benedict XVI concluded, “is rich in witnesses who spent themselves without sparing, at the cost of great suffering. The greater our hope, the greater our capacity to suffer for love of truth and good, joyfully offering up the small and great troubles of every day and inserting them in Christ's great 'suffering-with' ”. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 7/2/2008; righe 50, parole 751)