(First Week of Lent Monday Lev 19: 1-2, 11-18; Mt
25/31-46)
God’s
holiness is manifested in His glory, power, love, compassion, kindness,
forgiveness …
His
beauty, strength, wisdom and swiftness are desirable. We are taught to do it by
the Law that the Lord has given us. Thus we are partaking in the holiness of
God.
If we
desire the beauty of God in us, we desire to have noble thoughts, noble words
and dignified actions in us. It is necessary to keep watch whether the inputs
that we receive everyday give us a deeper growth in the beauty of God. It would
include the content and nature of what we read, see, the music we listen etc.
We need
to be strong too. Just as we take care of our physical health we need to be
taking care of our emotional and spiritual health. If we find ourselves ‘sick’
we must seek healing. Real introspection is to be done having courage to see
our own inner realities. Just knowing itself will heal much of the illness
bring us to well being. What we really require is sincerity of life to open up
our life before the Lord and to see clearly when the Lord opens for us the true
story of our life. We will know the reasons for our prejudices and dissensions.
If we find ourselves healthy we need to keep ourselves away from sickening
conditions.
We also
participate in the holiness of God by sharing in his wisdom which is a process
of growth granted to us in sincere devotion. Here there is an obligation of
intellectual reflection which can form a conscience for the world as Christ
would desire. Trend of the new time is lawlessness. Wisdom is to be inculcated
in disciplinary practice.
God’s
swiftness, omnipresence may be shared to us if we are open to have multiple
perspectives in seeing reality; that of ourselves and of what concerns us. Of course
it is also a mode of wisdom.
Lent is
a training time which helps us in entering into these divine qualities, at
least to desire for it. There we will see God’s power, kindness, wisdom etc
extending through our daily actions, though difficult. At the end, if we are
sincere with ourselves we will see it is God who is there at the giving end and
at the receiving end; one who feeds the hungry and the one who is fed, as a good
Samaritan and as the wounded traveller; one who clothes and adorns and on who
is clothed. Yes, God’s holiness, glory and power are revealed in the
sacramental possibility of human life especially in human body.
