Quotes about Lent

Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault- finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.

Woe to me, my mother, that you have borne me, a man of strife and conflict in all the land. I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me.

March 1 FIRST EMBER SATURDAY IN LENT Last night it snowed again and there is a fairly thick blanket of snow on the ground and on the trees. The sky looks like lead and seems to promise more. It is about as dark as my own mind. I see nothing, I understand nothing. I am sorry for complaining and making a disturbance. All I want is to please God and to do His will.

Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life and in this way to know the fundamental truth: who we are, where we come from, where we must go, what path we must take in life.

Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.

I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.

Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God's future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. Lent is for embracing the baby given to old people; resurrection to new life in Easter; and the offer of a new world made by God from nothing.

A great deal of power is thus lost in the Church. Fastings and vigils, without a special object in view, are time run to waste. They are made to minister to a sort of self-gratification, instead of being turned to account for the good of others. They are like groaning in sickness. Some people amuse themselves when ill with continuous moaning. The forty days of Lent might be annually spent in visiting adjacent tribes, and bearing unavoidable hunger and thirst with a good grace.

During the season of Lent which begins today, we renew our commitment to the path of conversion, making more room for God in our lives.