Every car or truck carries in the glove compartment a maintenance schedule. Having your oil changed, your tires rotated and balanced, and the rest of the engine checked keeps ones vehicle in excellent shape.
Lent provides us an opportunity to open our personal maintenance schedule and take a close look at ourselves as we journey towards eternal life. It is the time to look back and make up for what we failed in our life.
A stranger rolled a flat tire into a service station for repair. The station manager dropped everything and cheerfully began. When he finished, the stranger asked, What do I owe you? The manager
said, “There is no cost! I’m just glad I could help you.” The stranger paused and said, “Do you mind telling me why you’ve done this for someone you’ll probably never see again?” The manager
said, “Well, yesterday, I woke up with a toothache and I treated a lot of good people in a shameful way. Today, I’m trying make up for the evil I did yesterday.
This season of lent reminds us to focus on overhauling of our spiritual life. Aside from what the Church law requires of us, fast and abstinence, we should come up with a personal program for spiritual growth. This is our personal maintenance program. The self-control that we exercise in giving up a legitimate pleasure strengthens our will and curbs the inclinations of our passions.
We should also do some kind of positive act that we would not normally do on a regular basis. A serious Lent will purify our soul and allow us to experience a deeper interior freedom. Fast from criticism, and feast on praise. Fast from resentment, and feast on contentment . . . Fast from fear, and feast on faith.
Today we accept the ashes on our forehead as a sign of our mortality and yet we are also reminded of the cross placed there at our Baptism. Our life here is only temporary. It calls us to strive for a deep truthful interiority for our life which is also essential to a Christian life.
As a newly-elected Pope walks to the altar to celebrate his first Mass as the head of the Catholic Church, a server—not a cardinal or a bishop, just a simple acolyte — stops him and burns a piece of cloth mounted on a reed. As the flames consume the piece of cloth, the server proclaims, "Pater sancte, sic transit gloria mundi!" (The Holy Father, thus passes the glory of the world!)
Three times, the Pope is stopped. Three times, a piece of cloth is burned before him. Three times, he is reminded about the fate of all things in this world. By the third time, the Pope's face must be covered in soot and ashes—just like our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. Maybe, as the sign of the cross, is, with ashes, traced on our foreheads, this is what we should think about: "Sic transit Gloria mundi!"
Nothing on this earth lasts. The hippest clothes will soon go out of fashion. That electronic gadget we are saving up for, will soon become obsolete. Cars break down, buildings are demolished. Stop a while. What fad have we been trying to pursue recently? Try to remember how much effort we have poured into this new fancy of ours. Then tell ourselves, "It will soon just be dust and ashes."
Today, as we are reminded of this, we should ask ourselves, "So what truly lasts? What endures? What, in the end is the only thing worth investing all our life to gain?"
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