Tips for Lenten Season

Insights of Pope Francis

Are you thinking of a meaningful observance of Lent? Pope Francis offers “some helpful thoughts on our path of conversion as individuals and as a community.” He is inspired by the words of St. Paul: “He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9).

1.   Love. “Charity, love, is sharing with the one we love in all things. Love makes us similar, it creates equality, it breaks down walls and eliminates distances. God did this with us. Indeed, Jesus worked with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He truly became one of us, like us in all things except sin.”

2.   Be Poor. “By making Himself poor, Jesus did not seek poverty for its own sake, but as St. Paul says ‘that by His poverty you might become rich’…. God did not let our salvation drop down from heaven, like someone who gives alms from their abundance out of a sense of altruism and piety.” He needed not repentance and conversion when He was baptized in the Jordan but “He did it to be among people who need forgiveness, among us sinners, and to take upon himself the burden of our sins. In this way He chose to comfort us, to save us, to free us from our misery.”

3.   Be a neighbor. The poverty of Christ “is His way of loving us, His way of being our neighbor, just as the Good Samaritan was neighbor to the man left half dead by the side of the road” (Ll. 10:25f.).

4.   Be compassionate. “What gives us true freedom, true salvation and true happiness is the compassion, tenderness and solidarity of His love. Christ’s poverty which enriches us is His taking flesh and bearing our weaknesses and sins as an expression of God’s infinite mercy to us.”

5.             Trust. “Jesus wealth is that of His boundless confidence in God the Father, His constant trust, His desire always and only to do the Father’s will and give glory to Him. Jesus is rich in the same way as a child who feels loved and who loves its parents, without doubting their love and tenderness for an instant.”