Thomas Merton Reading Ash Wednesday 13 Feb 2013

 

       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.