Ash Wednesday
The Gift of Lent: Homily by Abbot Brendan
“Come back to me with all your heart.” Those are the words echo through the ages, the tender call of a Father speaking to his child, urgent words of a Father longing for us to return home. If we have strayed, we are invited to return. If he have lost our way, we are invited to find once again the path to our Father’s house.
The voice of the Father calls out to us this Lent, gently but clearly, with a simple question: What road am I on? What path am I walking? Where am I truly heading?
Each of us is making choices—every day, in big and small ways. Are my choices leading me toward peace, or toward restlessness? Are they freeing me from what is ultimately dissatisfying or drawing me deeper into it? What are the values I am truly living by, not just in words, but in action?
I might have chosen the right road, but have I become distracted. There have been detours—some of my own making, others imposed by life—that have complicated the journey rather than leading me back to the Father’s embrace. Maybe I have even hesitated to return home, afraid that I no longer belong there, unsure if I will be welcomed.
Yet Lent is the season of grace, the time to turn back, to reorient ourselves toward the One who is always waiting. No matter how far we have wandered, the Father’s voice is still calling, still inviting, still loving.
Soon our foreheads will be marked with ashes. We were dust once, and unto dust we shall return. The philosopher Heidegger's view called us “beings unto death” meaning that it is the encounter with death that most profoundly highlights the question of our Being. As these ashes point us to our death it is to remind us why we are alive.
But we mortals are not just dust—we are dust infused with divine breath, creatures made for eternity, for task of love. The one task that encompasses all tasks.
Three Remedies
In the Gospel, Jesus offers three great remedies for our wandering hearts—three practices to reorient us:
1. Prayer: We pray because we are made for communion with God. When we pray, we remember that we are more than dust—we are beloved children, called to eternity.
2. Fasting: Fasting is the discipline of self-denial, a way of refusing to let our desires rule us. We live in a culture that tells us to consume, to accumulate, to indulge. But when we fast, we say: “I am not a slave to my appetites.” We rediscover simplicity, gratitude, and freedom.
3. Almsgiving: Prayer lifts our eyes to God, fasting purifies our hearts, and almsgiving opens our hands to our brothers and sisters. We are not just called to look upward, but outward—to the hungry, the poor, the lonely, the suffering where we touch thre flesh of Christ. What we let go of in fasting, we give away in love. What we deny ourselves, we offer to others.
Lent lived Joyfully
Too often, we see Lent as a burden, as a time of grudging sacrifice. But Dorothy L Sayers, in words that echo St Benedict advice to live Lent joyfully says: “Lent is not intended to be an annual ordeal during which we begrudgingly forgo a handful of pleasures. It is meant to be the church’s springtime, a time when, out of the darkness of sin’s winter, a repentant, empowered people emerges.
Put another way, Lent is the season in which we ought to be surprised by joy. Our self-sacrifices serve no purpose unless, by laying aside this or that desire, we are able to focus on our heart’s deepest longing: unity with Christ. In him—in his suffering and death, his resurrection and triumph—we find our truest joy.” — Dorothy Sayers, Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter
May Lent be a blessed and joyful time for us all.
