In the words of Saint Josemaria Escriva: "We must decide. It’s wrong to have two candles lighted – one to St Michael and another to the devil. We must snuff out the devil’s candle: we must spend our life completely in the service of the Lord. If our desire for holiness is sincere, if we are docile enough to place ourselves in God’s hands, everything will go well. For he is always ready to give us his grace, especially at a time like this – grace for a new conversion, a step forward in our lives as Christians."
On Wednesday we will enter into the Lenten season and thus begin to prepare ourselves in a most special way to encounter the light of hope that is ushered into our lives through the event of the Resurrection. We often allow our life to be divided between our love for God, our love for this world, and our refusal to turn away from the lies of the devil that make us believe that we are receiving what we truly need. If we continue to allow ourselves to be divided in such a manner we cannot claim that we have truly become stewards of Christ and the message of His Gospel. Lent is a vessel which allows us to feel and see the push of conversion and to truly respond in a manner which allows us to put our service to our multiple masters to rest; in order that we can place our trust in our true master who is found in Heaven. May we in this season find ways to empower ourselves to snuff out the candle that we have lit for the devil. This can come easily or can be very tough, but nevertheless if we use this season to our benefit with the help of God's grace this conversion is possible to achieve.
I hope that all of us have already begun to pray concerning this Lenten season and what rewards you will reap when you encounter the wounds of our Resurrected Lord on Easter Sunday. We cannot allow our laziness to get ahold of us which causes us to remain the same or worse yet become more entrenched in our sinfulness and thus our trust in Satan's lies. Therefore we must enter into this season abandoning ourselves to practices such as fasting, almsgiving, and prayer in order to train our bodies and minds to turn away from the lies of our worldliness and that of the devil and thus begin to find true liberation and freedom that can only be brought about when we are not split between multiple masters, but instead are found in faithful service to God.
We must therefore take our Lenten resolves and ask ourselves the following: How can we pray more sincerely? How can we fast from our disordered passions to discover true conversion? How can we give alms to those in need to respond to the charity that comes from our love for God? How are we going to turn away from our enslavement to this world? How are we going to snuff out the candle that we have lit for Satan? How do we plan to truly come to love God? I hope that when we look upon our Lenten goals we can see a positive answer to these five questions.
For an example, to give up a candy bar, just because, does not answer any of these questions positively. Instead we are only going through the motions of the law without truly desiring a change to take place in our life. Instead we could adopt the mindset that in our desire to eat that candy bar we can turn towards prayer and acknowledge our need to turn away from the sin present in our life, that with the money that was not spent on this product we could donate the money saved to a charity, in our sacrifice from our desire we are silencing the voice of the devil, and from this total abandonment we are setting into motion our never ending love for God.
We are on the cusp of the Lenten season, may we not, arrive at Easter without knowing how we got there. May we not reach out to feel the wounds of the risen Christ while we are infected with sin and our trust in other masters. May we embrace the practices of prayer, sacrifice, and almsgiving to help us realize the way that we took to arrive at Easter. May these practices truly assist us in our encounter with the risen Christ to the point where we will be prepared to behold His great glory. May this great season of Lent truly assist us in snuffing out the candle that we have lit for the devil through our own sinfulness and assist us with finally being able to embrace the conversion that will lead us to God and eventually to the Kingdom of Heaven.
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