We are on the threshold of a very meaningful season which marks a significant phase in the whole plan of salvation. The season of Lent as we know, is a time for renewal – ridding the old self and putting on a new self. I would like draw the example for renewal from the nature itself. If we just gaze at the trees we see them shedding off old and dead leaves and giving birth to the new ones. A tree that was looking bear and dead-like appears fresh, green, full of leaves, full of life. We call this phenomena ‘Spring.’ Lent has to become for us a Holy Spring. Lent has to be a time of death to old selves and rising in Christ on Easter Sunday. But this resurrection has to be preceded by conversion.
The Mother Church offers us a period of forty days to undergo transformation. A period of forty days is not to be taken as a conventional
number used to indicate a period of time necessary for actual preparation and maturation of an event of great significance. Thus the number forty was used to indicate the years that erring Israel had to spend in the desert before they were prepared enough to enter the Promised Land.
Often we might fall prey to the danger of marking lent by time. It may turn out to be a mere practice of the exhortations of the Church regarding the season. One may fast, pray and abstain for forty days and just await the forty first day to get back to old practices. I say, if all the fasting, praying and abstaining don’t lead to a deep conversion experience everything would seem useless.
So as we are about to embark on this beautiful season let us plan how worthily we can enter into the season. Let us plan each step we take with Christ on his way to Calvary. And may every step we take with Christ be a milestone we cross before reaching our conversion, because "conversion is resurrection."
I wish that all of us may be liberated from our iniquities just in time to have a real Easter experience, a death and resurrection experience.
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