ASH WEDNESDAY
Night
Office -Alternative Reading
From Thomas Merton, O.CS.O.
(Meditations on the Liturgy, 100-101)
A time
of metanoia
The paschal mystery is above all the mystery of life,
in which the Church, by celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ, enters
into the kingdom of life which he has established once for all by his
definitive victory over sin and death.
We must remember the original meaning of Lent in which the catechumens were
prepared for their baptism, and public penitents were made ready by penance for
their restoration to the sacramental life in a communion with the rest of the
Church.
Lent is then not a season of punishment so much as one of
healing.
There is joy in the salutary fasting and abstinence of
the Christian who eats and drinks less in order that his mind may be more clear
and receptive to receive the sacred nourishment of God's word, which the whole
Church announces and meditates upon in each day's liturgy throughout Lent.
The whole life and teaching of Christ pass before us,
and Lent is a season of special
reflection and prayer, a forty day retreat in which each Christian, to the
extent that he or she is able, tries to follow Christ into the desert by prayer
and fasting.
Some, monks and ascetics, will give themselves
especially to fasting and vigils, silence and solitude in these days, and they
will meditate more deeply on the word of God.
But all the faithful should listen to the word as it is
announced in the liturgy or in the Bible services and respond to it according
to their ability.
In this way, for the whole Church, Lent will not be merely a season simply of a few formalized
penitential practices, half understood and undertaken without interest, but a
time.
of metanoia, the turning of all minds and hearts
to God in preparation for the celebration of the paschal mystery in which some
will for the first time receive the light of Christ, others will be restored to
the communion of the faithful, and all will renew the baptismal consecration of
their lives to God, in Christ.
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