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LENT YEAR

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FROM EXODUS TO EASTER MY D A I LY J O U R N E Y T H RO U G H L E N T

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AUTHOR n Rev. Frank P. DeSiano, CSP Fr. Frank DeSiano, CSP, a noted speaker and author, is President of Paulist Evangelization Ministries. A number of his books, including Why Not Consider Becoming a Catholic?, are available at www.pemdc.org.

GENERAL EDITOR n Rev. Kenneth Boyack, CSP EDITOR n Ms. Paula Minaert DESIGN AND LAYOUT n Pensaré Design Group, LTD COVER IMAGE n © ictor / iStockphoto.com Nihil Obstat: Rev. Christopher Begg, S.T.D., Ph.D., Censor Deputatus.

Imprimatur: Most Rev. Barry C. Knestout, Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, Archdiocese of Washington, March 20, 2013.

The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free from doctrinal or moral error. There is no implication that those who have granted the nihil obstat and the imprimatur agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed therein.

Copyright © 2013 by Paulist Evangelization Ministries. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the copyright owner.

Scripture references for Sunday Mass are taken from the Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America, second typical edition © 1998, 1997, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Other Scripture references are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Excerpts from the English translation of The Roman Missal © 2010, International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Published by Paulist Evangelization Ministries 3031 Fourth Street, NE, Washington, DC 20017 www.pemdc.org

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M AY 2 0 1 3 P RI NTI N G

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From Exodus to Easter MY DAILY JOURNEY THROUGH LENT

REV. FRANK P. DESIANO, CSP

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Introduction Each year, in the Easter Triduum, the Church solemnly proclaims the mystery of the Christian faith—the death and resurrection of Jesus—for the faithful and for the world.

We may think of Lent as a stand-alone component, a period of forty days where the faithful identify explicitly with the process of conversion and reconnect to their own Baptism. We are well aware of the violet (purple) robes, the lack of alleluias, and the call to fasting and penance. But the Church then calls the faithful still further. Lent culminates in Easter, in the joyful acknowledgement of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Lent is forty days, but Easter is fifty days. Easter doesn’t end with Easter Sunday but goes all the way to Pentecost. And Lent actually has meaning as part of this larger expanse of time. By living the experience of the entire ninety days we celebrate the fullness of the Paschal Mystery, the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The cycle of Scriptures that we have this year, Year A, presents some of the greatest readings from the Gospel according to John, readings that have helped the Church from its beginning reflect on conversion, renewal, and hope. They already anticipate the disciple’s life in the Holy Spirit—the gifts of forgiveness, spiritual vision, and new life in Christ.

Lent, with its special Scripture readings and spiritual practices, offers a wonderful opportunity to renew one’s mind and heart in Christ. Each week of Lent, this devotional booklet will help orient the believer’s heart to the celebration of the upcoming Sunday— the readings and the rites of our Sunday Mass. As each week 2

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directs us toward Sunday, so the accumulation of Sundays will direct us toward the glory of Easter and beyond, to the great Fifty Days and the feast of Pentecost. Each day’s reflection highlights an aspect of the Mass or of the coming Sunday Scriptures. It thus helps us tie the daily discipline of Lent into the larger picture of our identity with Jesus, our journey with those who are joining the Church, our expectation of Easter, and our celebration of the Holy Spirit. This daily spiritual practice develops in the reader a habit that can be used all through the year: to live our week in anticipation of the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. Those Sunday celebrations will themselves orient us to the fullest vision of our Catholic life, how we have been called to discipleship in order to share faith in this life, and have life in its fullness forever.

In the pages for the six Saturdays of Lent, we provide a list of the readings for the following Sunday’s Mass. For example, the readings for the First Sunday of Lent on page 15 look like this:

READINGS FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6, 12-14, 17; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11 PSALM RESPONSE: Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.

Plan to read and pray over these readings sometime during the week as you prepare for Sunday Mass. Many Catholics have adopted this practice as part of their weekly spiritual exercises and find that it nourishes their souls. Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you in making it a habit of the heart for you.

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Monday How often do Catholics make the sign of the cross? How often do we not only touch the four points on our bodies that mark this sign, but also recite the words that we hear so often, words that begin every celebration of the Mass? “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

REFLECTION Think what a name does. It allows us to have personal contact with other people. When I know someone’s name, I can address that person and attract his or her attention. Think of how important it is for someone to have his or her name on the office door. It’s a sign of recognition for the person’s co-workers, and a point of reference for communication. Think, too, of how often people exchange business cards or, perhaps even more today, e-mail or Facebook tags, as a way to keep in contact or share important information.

Names usually point to concrete things or to people. A name permits me to have a relationship with a person or to control an item. In the fields of law, medicine, or science, half the work consists of learning the terms the profession uses to name things.

But God is not a thing or an object in our field of vision. Nor is God a person in the way humans are persons. So how do we name God? And what does a name for God do in our lives?

For believers, it is God who gives us the divine name. In Exodus 3 God appears in the burning bush to Moses. “I am who I am,” God says to Moses, thereby giving God’s name, YHWH, a name that Jewish people consider so sacred, they do not even pronounce it.

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We Christians believe we have names of God that come from the distinctive revelation of Jesus Christ: what he showed us about God. He, the Son, reveals the Father and sends forth the Spirit.

When we make the sign of the cross, or pray in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, we express the kind of new and intimate contact with God that Jesus has opened up for us.

In Jesus we know God more fully; that is why we can call upon God as Father, Son, and Spirit. We become part of the relationship among the three Persons of the Trinity that Jesus revealed.

QUESTION How often in a day do you invoke God as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit?

ACT Spend ten minutes reflecting on God as Father, Son, and Spirit.

Try to experience the relational power of these words—God beyond us, God beside us, God dwelling within us.

PRAYER Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

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Tuesday Do we ever notice our gestures at Mass—the major ones we do with our bodies? Certainly, non-Catholic visitors see that the congregation is sitting one moment, standing the next, and kneeling at another time. Often, though, Catholics just go through the motions. But what do they mean?

REFLECTION One of our basic Catholic impulses is to kneel to affirm the real presence of Jesus Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. When we walk into the church, we know that the reserved Blessed Sacrament—the presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread—is stored in a tabernacle. When we pass before that tabernacle, we have been taught to genuflect or make a profound bow (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1378). We also may kneel in adoration and prayer. We kneel during a portion of the Eucharistic Prayer, and at the invitation to Communion. Kneeling is a position of humility and shows our total respect before the awesome presence of God. Kneeling is an act of awe. We know how shy we would be if we met the president of the United States, or a famous celebrity. How much more does the presence of God affect us?

We Catholics also spend a lot of time sitting during Mass. This is more than a time to relax. Rather, sitting is the attitude of a learner, of one who is receiving something important. In the Scriptures, we read of the disciples “reclining” with Jesus at table— Jesus put them at ease and treated them as particular friends. “I no longer call you slaves,” Jesus says; “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Sitting in church is more than “taking a load off our feet.”

It is a gesture of intimate reception of all the Lord would give us, like Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet (Luke 10:39).

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At certain times, too, we stand during Mass. Standing is a classic posture of prayer in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

At the beginning, as we build up to the Collect—the opening prayer—we stand as a sign that we are called to attention, to be “all ears” and alert. We stand for the three solemn prayers of the Mass—the Collect, the Prayer over the Offerings, and the Prayer after Communion—because we are addressing God as one body, through the words of the priest. We stand during the Creed and the Intercessions, proclaiming the mysteries of our faith and interceding for the needs of all people. The Our Father also finds us standing, praying for the coming of God’s Kingdom.

And we stand from the Prayer after Communion to the end of Mass because we are being commissioned to be sent forth. The Israelites (with “sandals on your feet”) stood while eating the Passover (Exodus 12:11) as a sign of readiness.

Awe, openness, readiness: our bodies say this as much as any words we use.

QUESTION How does the sequence of movements at the Mass affect you?

Do they facilitate your prayer? How?

ACT Be mindful of all the movements you and your fellow worshippers make together this Sunday at Mass.

PRAYER Help me give myself to you, Lord, in body and soul, in gesture and word, so I may hear you more clearly, follow you more readily, and behold you more fully. Amen.

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Ash Wednesday Although the practice is spreading beyond the Catholic community to other Christian churches, people mostly identify the reception of ashes with Catholics. Smudges of ashes adorn the heads of politicians and schoolchildren. What are the ashes calling us to?

REFLECTION One of the prayers that the priest can say over the people the Monday of the first week of Lent goes like this: “Enlighten the minds of your people, Lord, we pray, with the light of your glory, that they may see what must be done and have the strength to do what is right. Through Christ our Lord.”

There are many images of sin, but we do not often think of it as a kind of blindness, an obscuring of sight. Can it be that when sin entered the world, one of its functions was to darken human vision, to cover our eyes with layers that keep us from seeing God, and from truly seeing each other?

Can it be that forgiveness can seem like the restoration of sight?

The ability to see clearly again? The chance to get rid of the distortions that so often cloud our vision of ourselves?

We receive ashes today as a sign of our willingness to enter into this penitential season with humility and with deep faith that God will renew our minds and hearts through his grace. Lent is a time of illumination and enlightenment, a time to learn to see with the eyes of Christ.

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Our ashes, then, represent this temporary period of darkness, this time of fasting and repentance that we undergo, in order to move us beyond contrition to a new vision, a new way of seeing ourselves and God. We wear ashes as a sign that, obscured as our sight may have become, God will bring us from darkness to a new and brilliant light.

QUESTION If you think of sin as a kind of blindness, as layers of covers over our eyes, what covers would you like to be removed from your eyes? What are the things that obscure your picture of yourself and of God? What most distorts your spiritual vision?

ACT Spend a few moments trying to cast light on the dimension of your sinfulness you tend to deny the most. Why do you keep it hidden? What can God’s light reveal?

PRAYER “I do believe, help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Recite this slowly ten times, committing yourself to deeper conversion this Lent.

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T hursday Eden. The garden of paradise. The garden of our dreams, our hopes, our past. The garden that captures so many of our ideals.

The garden from which our first parents were evicted. Eden, a paradise lost.

REFLECTION The first reading for this coming Sunday will take us to our very origins, to the story of our creation, with our first parents, Adam (the Man) and the Woman, who was taken from the man and equal to him. We will hear the serpent whispering much more than sweet nothings into the ear of the Woman. We will see how he begins to suggest doubt, how that doubt grows, and how both the Woman and the Man eat the forbidden fruit.

The story we have is so full of symbols that we can become overwhelmed by them. What does a talking serpent mean? Why is the temptation the serpent offers so seductive? What tips the scale, as the Woman chooses? What does it mean to discover one is naked?

One of our biggest mistakes would be to think that all of this happened a long time ago, back in some mythical past. The story from Genesis is cast primarily in the past, but it actually doesn’t put the sin of Adam thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Rather, the story talks about all human time, about the way all humans tend to respond to God, and about the sin that lurks inside of us, defining our relationship with God from the beginning. It is more than history—this is our biography. Adam is all humankind, all of us.

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The Man and the Woman take of the fruit because, for all that they’ve been given, they harbor the sense that it is somehow not enough. Rather than place their security in the God who brought them into being, mysteriously, from dust and nothing, they hedge their bets, attempting to secure their own security. Rather than accept the love that stands at the origin of their existence, they opt for suspicion and doubt. Rather than put God first, they put their illusions about themselves in God’s place.

Sound familiar?

QUESTION What do you think is the greatest temptation that humans have to face?

ACT Read a newspaper or news site on the Internet. See if you can define a common temptation that runs through all the bits of news.

PRAYER Lord, when I am most tempted not to trust in you, remind me that I have nowhere else to go with my trust. When I most think I can be my own god, remind me that I am making an idol of myself. When I am listening to the seductions of my delusions, fill me, Lord, with your truth.

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Friday “We were speaking Latin today,” one child says to another.

“Where?” The child responds, “At church, at Mass.” “Really,” the second child says, “What did you say?” “We said something like Keerie elayeeson.” The second child was blown away: “Wow!” he said.

REFLECTION Of course, the words of the Penitential Act, Kyrie eleison, are not Latin but Greek. It’s not important to know that, except that it reminds us that the liturgy in Rome was said originally in Greek.

This phrase, though, is not left over from those early days; it was imported later into the Latin rite from the Eastern rite. Some people today like Latin for the “classic,” almost nostalgic sense they get, even if they don’t understand a word of it. If Latin makes things sound classic, how much more true of Greek?

The Penitential Act today can be said in Greek or in English: Lord, have mercy. It is part of the opening rites of the Mass, which are like thresholds or lintels; we pass through them, leaving the distractions of every day to come before God. The words come from about as deep an impulse as believers can have: a profound sense of unworthiness to be in the presence of the Lord. Praying for mercy helps orient us toward the holiness of God. The phrase is repeated, often three times. It serves, then, as a litany, as a series of similar prayers repeated several times in order to reinforce the sentiments behind the prayer. Some litanies used in the Church, such as the Litany of the Saints (which is sung at priestly ordinations and at Baptisms), can

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go on for a while. The litany at the start of Mass does not last long, but it serves as a cry from the heart of the congregation for mercy and forgiveness.

The phrase Kyrie eleison was used in the early centuries in churches of the East, often accompanying processions and other sacred services. It first entered the liturgy in the West probably sometime in the fifth century. When we say or sing it today, we join a chorus of believers through the ages, in both the East and the West.

We keep saying “Lord, have mercy,” not because we think the Lord won’t have mercy. Rather, it’s so we won’t forget how the Lord does have mercy, in so many ways, on us—and how much we need it.

QUESTION How attentive are you to the request for forgiveness of sin at the start of Mass?

ACT Think of someone during this Lenten season who perhaps feels apart from the Lord, even estranged. During the weeks of Lent, try to reach out with tact and grace to this person, hoping to connect him or her once again to Christ.

PRAYER You were sent to heal the contrite of heart: Kyrie, eleison.

You came to call sinners: Christe, eleison.

You are seated at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us: Kyrie, eleison. (From the Penitential Act at Mass)

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Saturday Many people from the Eastern or Midwestern parts of the United States have never seen desert country. The first time they visit a state like Arizona, they are simply stunned. The emptiness and the stark beauty leave them speechless.

REFLECTION We meet Jesus in the desert, being tempted by Satan, in the gospel reading tomorrow. What, we might ask, is Jesus doing there? Why would he leave the lakes and hills of Galilee to be in barren country?

The desert played a particular role in the ancient Jewish imagination. God led the Israelites out of the desert in the Exodus, their escape from Egypt. There God fed them, gave them water, and guided them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

There they received the Ten Commandments and the covenant God made with them.

There, too, the Israelites also complained, did not trust God, demanded things of Moses, and even made the famous golden calf as an image of God, in violation of God’s first commandment.

The temptations that Satan puts before Jesus mirror, in contracted forms, the temptations of the Israelites some 1200 years before.

It’s as if things got off on the wrong foot between God and the Chosen People; now they are being rectified.

Jesus, rejecting anything for himself and keeping God at the very center of his vision, rejects the suggestions of Satan and thus makes up for the complaints and hesitations of the Chosen People. When we hear the words of Jesus—“Get away, Satan!

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It is written: ‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship / and him alone shall you serve’” (Matthew 4:10)—we are hearing a voice arising from a heart totally fixed on God. It’s the way it was supposed to have been from the beginning.

Jesus is tempted on our behalf. Having done the heavy lifting, Jesus asks if we can take on for ourselves his unwavering gaze.

QUESTION When you are alone, what are the thoughts that come to you, the temptations that haunt you?

ACT Try to summarize what you consider the most persistent, deepest temptations in your life, the ones that seduce you to try some alternative to following God.

PRAYER [Father] … you have given your children a sacred time for the renewing and purifying of their hearts, that, freed from disordered affections, they may so deal with the things of this passing world as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure. And so, with all the Angels and Saints, we praise you, as without end we acclaim: Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts… (From Preface II of Lent)

READINGS FOR THE FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6, 12-14, 17; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11 PSALM RESPONSE: Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned.

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