Gazing like Christ

The Lent season kicked off last Wednesday. Lent is a 40-day period that precedes Easter. During Lent, Christians are exhorted to prepare themselves for the Lord's Resurrection via an intense life of prayer, fasting, almsgiving and conversion.

Lent is a time where one discovers within the depths of one's being the need to return to the Father's house. To convert to God is indeed an urgent task. That is why on Ash Wednesday, the Church, while putting ashes on our foreheads, reminds us with great motherly love and care, to "repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15).

Thus, conversion is returning to the Lord God with all our heart. It is putting away foreign gods which destroyed our way of seeing, feeling and living our relationship with God and one another (see 1 Samuel 7:3) and instead espousing Christ's way of behaving. In Pope Benedict's words, Lent is a privileged time in which "we will discover [Christ's]... gaze that searches us profoundly and gives ... new life ... to each one of us" (message by Pope Benedict XVI for Lent 2006).

But how do we really seek Christ? The prophet Amos gives us a very practical counsel: "Seek good, and not evil, that you may live" (Amos 5:14). In other words, authentic conversion entails from us a life which is based on the virtue of charity, "by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1822). Since the letter of James makes it crystal clear that "faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead" (James 2:17), a life of conversion necessarily requires works of charity. The apostle James tells us that "religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world" (James 1:27).

A heart converted to God is one that offers Christ's compassionate gaze to those who long to be loved and cared for. May Christ's love take out our stony heart and give us a heart of flesh (see Ezekiel 11:19). All depends if we let Christ gaze at us, embracing and kissing us during this Lent (see Luke 15:20). Can we afford it?