A TALK ON THE SEASON OF LENT

Wednesday next week will be Ash Wednesday. The forty days of Lent are in front
of us - a time the Church uses to call us to conversion. Central to this liturgical
period are the three pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These three
pillars, rooted in Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, guide us on our
Lenten journey. They help us purify our hearts in conversion.
It's good to think of our heart this Lent. The heart is very important in our faith.
God reads our hearts. The Church invites us especially in the days of Lent to look
into our heart. To fashion our heart after the heart of Christ.
When God looks into our hearts, is he happy with what he finds? He tells us in
Scripture that “out of the heart of man come all sorts of evil things”.
Our blessed Mother invites us to change our heart especially during Lent. Try and
get out all the dirt, the bad things there - perhaps through a good confession. Or
through receiving as many sacraments as we can, to give us the graces that we
need – more frequent reception of Holy Communion. More frequent confessions.
Our Lord invites us to take very good care of our hearts. Keep it in good shape, not
allowing it to get soiled. And if ever it gets messed up and dirty, we go back to the
sacrament of confession to cleanse our hearts.
Frequently the responsorial psalm at masses during the days of Lent will be “A
humble and contrite heart, O Lord, you will not spurn”, because part of our goal in
our Christian life is to develop a humble and contrite heart.
Humble because as we are reminded on Ash Wednesday, we come from dust and
to dust we shall return. We’re nothing. We can do nothing. It’s only through God’s
grace that we can achieve anything.
That’s why we look for that grace in the sacraments. Because as the Catechism
teaches us, it is through the sacraments are that divine life is dispensed to us.
Lent also invites us to disconnect a little bit from the exterior things of our life and
look a little more inwardly, more into our interior.

1
If I want the world to be a better place, then I have to be a better person – more
virtuous, more humble, more charitable, more patient, more kind, more pure and
chaste.
Sometimes we think of Lent as a time for exterior purification, which is not bad.
Because often we can achieve interior purification through exterior purification,
through denying ourselves certain pleasures – getting up on time, eating a little bit
less of what we like and a little more of what we don’t like, not complaining, not
criticizing, not indulging in some pleasure or whim that we enjoy.
Anecdote: Many Lents ago, I invited a friend, much older than myself, who was a
coffee lover to merienda. As usual I ordered some pastries and coffee because he
loved coffee, he was a coffee connoisseur, a coffee addict. To my surprise he said
no coffee for me. He was giving up coffee for the entire Lent. Wow, I found it
inspiring even edifying - a senior exempt from fasting and abstinence giving up his
“addiction”. Among the thoughts that crossed my mind was his parents must have
taught him about the meaning of Lent.
Much of our spiritual education start before we reach school age. Try and
introduce your children or grandchildren to these practices – very healthy spiritual
practices from an early age. Expose them to the ashes of Ash Wednesday. They
will come to love these things. Try not to let them think that Lent is the time to go
to the beach, to Boracay, to enjoy.
If you have the opportunity, go to Mass more frequently, daily if you can. That’s a
wonderful thing to offer to God – the effort to get up early, to go even if it’s very
hot or it’s very inconvenient.
Or if you can, make some visits to the poor or the sick as a family - to bring some
bit of joy to families that have less in life. That would be good alms giving.
Or maybe expose your children or grandchildren, or nephews and nieces to the
Way of the Cross, a great devotion in the Church, very appropriate for Lent, where
we look at Christ on the Cross, follow him in His journey to Calvary, which has so
many lessons for us.
Christ falls down, but He gets up again. In some ways that’s our own life story right
there.

2
He allows his heart to be pierced by a lance. He doesn’t come down from the
cross. He stays there so that we, when we face temptations to come down from
our little or big crosses in our work, in our family, in our marriage, we learn to stay
there as Christ did.
The Way of the Cross teaches us wonderful things. The Holy Cross invites us to
accept the blows that may come as a means to grow in virtue, in humility, in
acceptance of the will of God. It develops our character, makes it easier for us to
avoid all the bad interior things that may be inside us – envy, criticisms,
detractions, judgments.
During Lent we hear a lot about fasting and abstinence – the exterior kind – food,
meat, etc. especially on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but often it’s the
interior things that we have to fast from a little more: from those quick criticisms,
from sarcasms, from those quick judgments, often rash, from whining and
complaining, from getting even when we think someone has attacked us even if
it’s only from our imagination.
Remember the Pharisee who said, “God I thank you that I’m not like the rest of
men, extortionists, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”
Well, there’s a lot of Pharisee inside each of us. It’s easy for us to be a modern day
Pharisee. To say all sorts of things externally but inside of us it’s completely
different. To be hypocrites.
That’s why we must purify the inside, take care of our hearts. In the Old
Testament, the Book of Joel, Scripture says: “Rend your heart and not your
garments” so that when God looks at our hearts and reads our hearts, He sees
beautiful things there.
All the time, our Lord is leading us forward along the path of holiness, the
pilgrimage of faith which our Christian vocation is. And Lent is always a good time
to start again. Because Lent is a time of great spiritual bonanza.
Try and follow the liturgy of Lent closely: the Responsorial Psalms, the Alleluiah
verses, the Entrance Antiphons.

3
These are small parts of the liturgy but you will find great riches there that can
inspire your heart and whet your appetite for spiritual things and help you to a
deeper approach to Lent.
There are many aspirations, short, quick prayers that we can find in the words of
the liturgy, and in the words of scripture that we read or hear every day of Lent.
There is this popular belief that our Protestant brothers are better versed about
the Scriptures than us. Like they can pull out quotes from Scriptures just like that –
from memory.. But did you know that Catholics have more exposure than other
Christian denominations to the Scriptures? Yes, because those of us who attend
mass regularly, especially those who go every day get to read or listen to the
choicest parts of Scripture pre-selected for us in regular doses, like our vitamins
for our physical health.
We absorb these thoughts, these scripture passages in the liturgy. Most especially
during Lent.
From those short thoughts or prayers, we can get some inspirations that can help
us through the day like: “We adore you O Christ and we bless you, because by
your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”
Many little phrases can come to us that can be very meaningful. Phrases that can
help us to supernaturalize our day and sanctify it. It can also give us great peace
and joy and lead us to spontaneous bursts of prayer during the day.
There is one thing we can particularly focus on in the season of Lent, the beauty
of confession – of our own personal confession, of our frequent confession. To
strive to always be in the state of grace, and to see how, if possible, we can reach
out to others and share with our family and friends the beauty and power of
confession.
There was this student in Kyoto. He was Catholic and attended the means of
formation at Yoshida Student Center just like Buklod. He had listened intently to a
talk on the apostolate of confession and had been pondering what he could do,
how he could invite or attract friends to confession. Remember less than 1% of
Japanese are Catholics.

4
One day at the library of the university he was attending, he was thinking: only 1%
of Japanese are Catholics and since there are at least 100 people in the library,
perhaps one could be Catholic? He knew that bumping into a Catholic would be so
improbable but what the heck, I will try to do some apostolate of confession. So,
he leaned over to the guy next to him and said: Hey would you like to go to
confession? What’s that? Well you go into this little dark room, there’s a priest
behind the small window and you tell him all the bad things you have inside your
mind and heart. You get all of them out, you empty everything out, all the
garbage, and the rubbish, be sorry for all of them and resolve not to do them
again. Then you feel good. You come out of there unburdened and as light as a
feather.
And surprise of surprises, the guy said: maybe I want to try that. Long story short,
the fellow started going to the Center received instructions there and 4 months
later he was baptized and went to confession. This should be easy to replicate
here, right? After all 80% of Filipinos are Catholics. They’re all around us, at
home, at work, in the mall, at the park,etc.
We will never know for sure what fruits our apostolate of confession will produce
but for sure we will be helping other hearts and souls to grow and help the blood
of Christ to get in there and wash away sins. And sin is the ugliest reality in our
world. That’s the only thing we must fear because it’s the only thing that can shut
us out of heaven.
Reflect on this often this Lent: many things in our life that we feel are evil are not
evil – not having material things, losing a job, sickness or disease, the loss of a
loved one, etc. None of these are evil because none of these things can keep us
from entering heaven.
In fact, we can use them to get to heaven.
Listen to St. Josemaria Escriva from The Way
194. I will tell you which are man's treasures on earth so that you will appreciate
them: hunger, thirst, heat, cold, pain, dishonor, poverty, loneliness, betrayal,
slander, prison…
182. Let us drink to the last drop the chalice of pain in our poor present life. What
does it matter to suffer for ten years, twenty, fifty… if afterwards there is heaven
5
forever? And, above all — rather than because of the reward, propter
retributionem — what does suffering matter if we suffer to console, to please God
our Lord, in a spirit of reparation, united to him on his Cross; in a word: if we
suffer for Love?…
Thus, the Church invites us to deny ourselves the little everyday things around us
that we enjoy: delicious desert, air conditioner, water, or soft, medium or hard
drinks etc., because of the effect that denial has interiorly on our soul. We say no
to the body in order to say yes to the soul.
Lent is all about our soul. Often if God permits some pain in our body, or some
contradiction, or some reversal of fortune, it’s because He wants our soul to fly.
The spiritual realities can become enormously rich and enormously important. We
can come to discover the greater reality of the spiritual.
There are souls all around us: souls who are looking for a spiritual uplift, souls who
need to have their eyes open to spiritual realities, lost souls.
Modern materialism tends to bury man in the material world. The attraction of
the material world, the material pleasures distract man from the reality that he
has a soul – it tells him he has no soul and no tomorrow beyond the material
world. That’s the main rationale for abortion or even euthanasia. Man is just a
material thing. He is disposable like any other material thing. Abort a baby
because of the inconvenience. Euthanize a sick old man because he is a burden.
But all the great religions of the world speak about the spiritual nature of man –
Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity. That’s one thing all these
religions have in common – a belief in the spiritual nature of man. Man is body
and soul.
And in Furrow 982 St. Josemaria said, “Have you noticed that mortified souls,
because of their simplicity, have a greater enjoyment of good things, even in this
world.”
That’s because when we deny our body certain pleasures, often it opens the eyes
of our soul to deeper realities, to greater pleasures. Spiritual pleasures.
And speaking from experience, as we grow older, we find that the things that gave
us much pleasure earlier in our life, like playing sports, night outs with friends for

6
a drink or 2, or feasting on our favorite culinary delights once in a while, watching
Netflix or you tube or tik tok, etc. we find our attraction to those pleasures
starting to wane. We start to get much more joy from the spiritual things.
The more brutal truth perhaps is that as the old body begins its natural process of
decay, the soul can still continue to grow and grow. And we can discover new
youthfulness, a new joy, even when the body is tired and weary.
St. Josemaria tells us in The Furrow Pt. 983, “Without mortification there is no
happiness on earth,”
Many things that we have aren’t necessary. Think about it. So it is good in every
person’s life that they deny themselves the fruit of a certain tree, so to speak –
certain pleasures that come from certain things.
What we need is that salt of mortification. It strengthens our character,
strengthens our soul. We grow in fortitude. We know how to say no to ourselves
and sometimes to other people. We strengthen our backbone. (Claus’ anecdote –
because you must learn to accept a no from time to time – it develops character, it
makes it less difficult to say no to yourself.)
St. Josemaria Escriva Furrow Pt 984: “When you make up your mind to be more
mortified, your interior life will improve and you will be much more fruitful.”
The Church invites us to think of Lent as training for a marathon. And I think we all
have an idea what it takes to train for a marathon. You need to have a structured
training plan that gradually increases your running distance and intensity. You
need strength exercises, proper hydration and nutrition, and even mental
preparation; most importantly, you have to ensure you have sufficient rest and
days for recovery.
Lent is like preparation time for a spiritual marathon. The Church gives us an
opportunity every year to get into better shape spiritually and to help everybody
around us to do the same.
St. Josemaria says that in all human activities there must be men and women who
in their lives and work, raise Christ’s cross aloft for all to see, as an act of
reparation. And sometimes that cross can be very heavy. So we need to be
spiritually fit to bear and lift that cross.

7
But that cross is also as St. Josemaria says in Furrow Pt. 985, “a symbol of peace
and of joy, a symbol of the love that the Most Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Spirit had, and continues to have for mankind.”
The cross needs to be there in our life. When we go closer to the Mass, we go
closer to the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, and this can give the
cross more meaning in our life.
Lent can be a time for us to focus more on the mass, attend it more frequently,
paying attention, rejecting distractions. In short, improve the quality of our
hearing mass so that it can really become the summit and the source of our
spiritual life, the center and the root.
From our deeper contemplation of Christ on the Cross, we come to understand
better the workings of the divine grace in our souls.
It’s the Blood of Christ that washes away our sins. Lent is also a good time to
contemplate the precious blood of Christ. Thank God for shedding his blood for
us. Greater love than this no one has, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.
Christ died for us!
Let us end with this quote from St. Josemaria in his book “Christ is Passing By”
“We are at the beginning of Lent: a time of penance, purification and conversion.
It is not an easy program, but then Christianity is not an easy way of life. It is not
enough just to be in the Church, letting the years roll by. In our life, in the life of
Christians, our first conversion — that unique moment which each of us
remembers, when we clearly understood everything, the Lord was asking of us —
is certainly very significant. But the later conversions are even more important,
and they are increasingly demanding. To facilitate the work of grace in these
conversions, we need to keep our soul young; we have to call upon our Lord, know
how to listen to him and, having found out what has gone wrong, know how to
ask his pardon.”
And if I may add, let’s not forget that after Good Friday, comes Easter. A season of
great Joy! In his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis said: “There are
Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter.” That’s a reminder to some
of us who sometimes forget that Christ came so we “might have life and have it
more abundantly” Pray for the Pope read his Lenten message. Google.
8
Let’s pray for Pope Francis. He has and find time to read and reflect on the
Message of the Pope Francis for Lent 2025. You can google it.
“There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter,” Pope Francis
writes in his 2013 encyclical Evangelii Gaudium (6). He’s pointing his finger at any
so-called Christian who refuses to live a life of joy, (Jn 10:10).