A time for meditation, Lent calls for a new decision to come out of the cavern of our ego, where in times of difficulty we hide for fear of being defeated by problems which are bigger than we are. The decision to look around us and to have the courage to play our part is what must mature in this period of spiritual incubation, prelude to the great reawakening of Easter. At times we are paralysed by the fear of falling without realising that this is a refined form of diffidence and lack of confidence, which are signs of our egoism, difficult to see and even more difficult to eliminate. Lent encourages to search for bread, but another type of bread which gives us the strength to open the door of I and rediscover confidence and courage.
As in the beginning, so today at the heart of history, there resounds peremptory God's question to Adam "Adam where are you?" This is a question which we cannot ignore as if it were addressed to others and to not each one of us personally. The question "Where are you" makes us come out into the open and to act, so as to make what we call the 'world of others', our own world. We cannot reply like Adam "I was hiding". Coming out of the cavern means finding our proper vocation, so we can project our life as a continuous journey heavenwards.
In fact God's first general question is followed by another more specific: "Where is your brother?" and Cain's reply is widespread: "Am I the keeper of my brother?" During this important period of the liturgical year I think we hear clearly God's call: "Leave you land". This command given to Abraham is addressed to each of us. We must set out without hesitation, so that rather than remaining under the bushel, our lamp shines brightly around us. It is not easy, but it must be done: we must break the chains of our I, who cares only about himself, a prisoner of his yearning for power or a victim of his anxieties. We must wake up and say: "Lord what do you want me to do?"
God will only answer our question if it is sincere and profound, made in prayer and sustained by the fear of taking the wrong road. In fact God lets us find the path, trusting in the creativity of our faith. But for this we must stop and meditate: Lent is a time of incubation. The paths are infinite in number and our God does not want everyone to serve him in the same way. The mystery of humanity is expressed in equality and diversity, it is also a compendium of many paths opened and travelled that have often come into conflict with each other, not always creating, at times destroying.
The austere voice of Lent repeats what Jesus said: "If anyone wants to serve me let him follow me, and where I am, there too will be my servant". Although the modalities are personal, the disposition of the path is always "service". The Greek word used is not doulos which means slave, but rather diakonos which means putting oneself at the disposal of others - an authentically Christian form of altruism - and not a using of others for self which is a refined form, typically pagan, of egoism. "If anyone serves me, my father will honour him" So how must we serve? How can we explain diakonia?
Tragedies caused by evil, negative fractures in the world - hunger, disease, migration, unemployment…- must be changed to good through moral commitment of each one of us because our God is a God of life not of death, a God of joy, not of affliction. Holiness is manifested in commitment to redeem the world, in communion with the God of mercy and peace. Created in the "image of God" each one of us is "God's memory in time". "God is invisible. You only have to look at human beings to remember God" wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel, who added: "The field of religion is the whole world, the whole of its history, everything, great and small, the glorious and the commonplace".
Lent is important because it leads us to ask ourselves whether we intend to live in a way that makes God ashamed of us and decides to remove "his memory" from the world, or instead we want him to be proud of us and recognise himself in our acts and in our words. Today history calls for decisions whose consequences are long term. What may appear irrelevant, may not be, but, like the pebble thrown into the lake, may cause ripples which spread and gradually reach the other side.
Time is always a stormy sea, difficult to sail. Faith sustains us because it guarantees that we are on a boat which is rocked but which the waves can never sink. Yes it is true Cain's hatred for his brother Abel is part of our history, but it is also true that besides Cain's hatred there is the devouring love of Christ on the Cross, which will soon explode on the Tabor of Glory. How can we refuse to let ourselves be captured by this flame and so consume the slag of hatred we carry within our hearts?
It is said that once a young Jew went to a Rabbi for the first time and when the Rabbi asked him "what have you done in your life" he replied that he had read four times the hundreds of books that make up the Talmud. But the Rabbi asked him "and how many times has the Talmud passed through you?" What we must strive for then is not the reading of the Gospel, but rather assimilating the Gospel and to do this we must return to the system of medieval monks who read "ore sine requie ruminantes", that is, we must let ourselves be captured by the word, so that it becomes once again incarnate in the history of our day. (Fides Service 28/3/2003 EM lines 65 Words: 1,047)