God offers us three appointments
Ash Wednesday Homily – February 17, 2021
"The closeness of a God who reveals himself as merciful, slow to anger and full of love for all who seek him."
He is very close and he offers us three meetings that will fuel our Lenten season. Whatever order we take, we could retain what the Gospel offers us this morning. Curiously, it is not first of all the prayer that is stated in this passage from today's Gospel.
The first meeting is almsgiving which characterizes charity and fraternal love as the royal way to reach the Lord who is very close. It is an expression of charity which is entitled to a certain primacy for the encounter with God. We will have to choose the forms that this charity and this dimension of almsgiving can be translated. Despite the current context, we must not forget the great fights that Lent generally allows us to join for a better sharing of goods, for a concern for development, for a certain number of causes both close to us and internationally.
Reading the scripture this morning, it appeared to me that there was perhaps a form of almsgiving, that is to say sharing, that we would have to develop between us. In a context, sometimes, where despair or negativity is displayed, where criticism and complaints are common towards others and oneself, would there not be a form of alms, of charity which would it be to collect all the beautiful things that are also manifested in the times we are going through?
In recent years, we have talked about this solidarity around care. Of this love that the caregivers showed. I was struck, these days, by a project of evenings via the Internet which could allow all those who wish to contemplate God's project for Humanity.
There are more than 165 registered for these evenings, which will take place during this Lenten season. I am not sure that, in a usual context, there would have been 165 people in the Salle de la Providence in Alençon. When we see all the retirement proposals deployed on the internet, let's try to look at more than this positive. Because we can always try to compare the positive to the negative, there will always be reasons. Let us try to discern the spirit of the Lord. Where does it manifest? What does he expect from us?
In this special time of Lent, we will join him, welcome him, bear witness to him, share him with others and commit ourselves concretely alongside him in the work he expects of us.
Let us try to be watchmen, guardians of hope, and to carry this alms around us, animated by the confidence that the Lord will not abandon us.
