Parish Magazine Editorial - March 2007

The month of March comes as winter is giving way to spring. The days lengthen and the weather improves. It is a month that draws us out of the darkness and monotony of winter towards new starts, fresh beginnings and spring cleaning! March falls in the Church’s season of Lent. Lent also calls us to move our spiritual lives forwards, leaving behind our selfish and inward looking ways, and drawing us forward to live by the fresh hope and new creation of Easter. We call this renewal repentance.
Repentance means putting God in the first place in our lives, and setting aside everything that gets in the way of God. Repentance is the only logical and sensible way to live our lives. God created us and loves us immensely. The deepest desires of our hearts were made by him and it is his purpose to bring them to fulfilment. If we trust God and follow him we can be confident that God will work on us and bring us to the fullness of life that that he intends. Unfortunately we always have a tendency to put our faith in our own agenda and our own self understanding, but this can never deliver to us the good which God intends. Worse still, our pride stops us from admitting this, even to ourselves.
Repentance is a lifelong process that we need to engage with all the time, but especially in Lent we are reminded of its importance. Repentance can sometimes feel costly because we have to let go of things which we hold dear, or own up to sufferings that we have caused others. Repentance calls us to devote ourselves to loving God and other people (e.g. Matt 22:37-40) and to spend less time thinking about ourselves. Obviously we have to love ourselves too, forgive ourselves and make sure that our own needs are met, but the purpose of doing this is to serve God better, and especially to serve him in the brothers and sisters we meet around us.
This year, in the Parish of Solihull we have wonderful Lent time resources to help us do just this. Many of us are involved in the “Life Source” home groups looking at prayer. In these groups we explore some of the different patterns of prayer that have arisen within the tradition of the church. Prayer helps us to focus more on God and to be more attentive to God. Through prayer we start to know God better and to understand more clearly the things that he wants from us in each present moment of our lives.
Another resource that we have is the Love Life Live Lent booklets. These suggest lots of simple, practical ways of loving our neighbours. By loving and serving our neighbour we are loving and serving Jesus (see Matt 25:31-46). All too often, our Christianity remains a spiritual thing which does not transform our outward lives. However by loving Jesus in the people around us, little by little, we start to build authentic relationships and to transform the world we live in. Loving the people around us requires us to laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep and this can require us to put aside our own joys and sorrows, as required by repentance. The booklets are especially good at challenging us to love people who are very different from us; from a different generation, culture or religion. This challenges us to make our love grow and become universal, like the love of Christ. This too requires repentance.
So this Lent may God’s grace help us to move forwards in true repentance. May we practice growing in love for God and growing in love for our neighbour, so that we can become ever more an influence for good in the world around us. - Fr Gerard