Ash Wednesday – Homily 3/06/19

Imagine you are on a Space Station for Lent; it is 356 feet long, 240 feet wide and 7 feet high.  That is slightly bigger than a football field.

1.    You must conserve water & food

2.    Waste must be kept to a minimum

3.    3 meals per day

4.    2.5 hours of physical exercise a day

5.    You have 15 or 16 sunrises & sunsets each day

6.    Wake-up at 6:00 a.m.

7.    Sleep at 9:30 p.m.

8.    There are: meetings, science experiments, & some free time

9.    What can you do with your free time: listen to music, read, watch DVDs, gaze at the earth & the stars, once a week talk to your family or read the scriptures, contemplate God’s grandeur & love.

That existence would be confining, but you would have time to think about Big ?s:  Why did God create me?  Why am I here?  Where am I going?  Lent is a time like that for us to reflect on the Big ?s  In our 1^st Reading the prophet Joel told us “…Rend your hearts, not your garments.”  God is calling on us to focus on inside, our character, not externals, our clothes.

St. Paul instructs us to “… receive the grace of God ….”  Be open to God’s grace, be thankful for God’s grace & use God’s grace to grow in holiness.

Matthew in his Gospel reminds us to “… pray in our inner room.”  That means pray always but never to get attention.  That is the reason the Church gives us the Lenten Season each year, time to look at ourselves, to take stock on how we are living as disciples of Jesus Christ.

St. Francis de Sales gave us two prayers to help us do just that.  The Direction of Intention and the Day Is Ending.  They can help us focus our day as we start and review our day as it ends.

Listen to the Direction of Intention “My God, I give you this day.

I offer you, now, all of the good that I shall do and … I promise to accept, for love of you, all of the difficulty I shall meet.  Help me to conduct myself during this day in a manner pleasing to you.” 

Allow that part of the prayer to guide your Lent and then your life.

“Help me to conduct myself during this day IN a manner pleasing to You.” 

At the end of the day we have this prayer:  “Thank you for all the gifts of this day, for the place I spent it And for those with whom I spent it, for all its joys and all its sorrows, for the troubles overcome and for those that remain.

I offer you the silence of this night, its darkness and its solitude.  Whether you choose under the cover of this night to take away the problems of this day, or leave them for tomorrow, I will bless your name.  Thy will be done.”  Amen.

At the end of each day remember to “Thank you [God] for all the gifts of the day … its joys & its sorrows, the troubles overcome & those that remain …. Thy will be done.”  Doing that will not make us rich & famous, but will help us become All that God wants us to Be and in the long run that is most important!

Think of this Lent as your time in the Space Station Spiritual Growth, and now for a few minutes, in silence, think about how you can be a better disciple of Jesus on Easter Sunday, than you are today and focus on that during Lent. 

May God Be Praised!