The season of Lent began this past Wednesday.  Most Christians recognize it as a day for penance and reflecting on how we stand before God.  Yes, and every year we hope to rise again from the ashes of our sins and failures “to create ourselves anew”.

Every year we take a journey, a pilgrimage through penance, self-discipline, prayer, and, hopefully, an abundance of good works, to the refreshing Easter waters of renewal.

This year seems especially critical for Catholics and other Christians to do penance for the “Christophorus” sweeping Africa and the Middle East.  We need especially to safeguard our freedom of conscience in the public square.

Our first reading is about God’s terrible anger with the human race - all except Noah and his family.
Because of this just man and his family, God instructed him to build an ark so that he could escape the avenging flood-waters that would destroy all other living creatures.  After forty days, that ark must have been a rather smelly place!  As Noah stepped out of the ark, he breathed new freshness from a world washed clean by water.  

Lent can help wash our world clean as we go from the ashes of war,  the murder of innocent children both in and out of their mothers’ wombs, and the greed that has brought such economic misery to both the guilty and the innocent. 

This Lent may we seek through God’s grace to rid ourselves of laziness and blindness and come to a renewal of all the covenants God has made with us, beginning with the one He made with Noah, leaving a rainbow of hope in the sky even to this day.

Lent brings to us a greater appreciation for the Passion and Death of Jesus as He made for all of us a New Covenant in His blood.

The Gospel gives Mark’s abbreviated story of Christ’s temptation in the desert by Satan. The other evangelists fill in more details.  Jesus experienced the same temptations the devil uses on all humans—the temptations to comfort and sensual appetites, the temptations to abuse whatever power we have, the temptations to pride and possessions. 

As Jesus went into the desert, so we should seek out a quiet space for reflection and renewal, for refreshing talks with Jesus, inviting our family members to do the same. 

Remember the words of Jesus as he began his public ministry: “This is the time of fulfillment.  Repent and believe in the Gospel”.