Lenten Reflections

Click here for the daily readings

By Dr. Marc Rugani, Professor of Theology

“Remember, you are dust and to dust you will return.”

As winter lingers on, ministers at the imposition of ashes speak chilling words to us. Heard also by the first man in Genesis 3:19, God reminds us that our very being is a complex of the good earth that God created and God’s “breath of life,” by which we become living beings (Genesis 2:7). However, when we deny God’s breath of life, the Holy Spirit within us, we become dismembered—split and set against God, others, and ourselves. Without just relationships and integral wholeness of body and spirit, we die.

Lent is a time to remember. It is a time to “put back together” the broken pieces of the necessary, sustaining relationships with God and others within our very selves. Psalm 51, the Miserere, can guide us. The psalmist invites us to ask God for a clean heart and steadfast spirit. We ask God to breathe back into us the life that we deny when we exalt ourselves and fail to love God, our neighbors, and our lovingly created earth. When we accept the ever present offer of grace in the Spirit, the words of our mouths and deeds of our hands praise God.

The title of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’, highlights this praise in the context of integral ecology, by which we learn of our interdependence upon each other and our biotic and abiotic partners in this common patrimony. Francis notes that, “Admittedly, Christians have not always appropriated and developed the spiritual treasures bestowed by God upon the Church, where the life of the spirit is not dissociated from the body or from nature or from worldly realities, but lived in and with them, in communion with all that surrounds us” (Francis, Laudato si’, n. 216). In this Lenten season let us remember and be remembered by God through the Spirit:

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.