The Christian holidays
by ENZO BIANCHI
To receive the ashes means to become aware that the fire of God’s love consumes our sin

Every year Lent return, a full time of forty days to be lived by Christians all together as a time of conversion, of return to God. Christians ought to live always resisting idols that entice, the time is always right for receiving the Lord-s mercy and grace, nevertheless the Church – which in its wisdom knows how we human beings are unable to live always on the same plane of high tension as we daily proceed towards the Kingdom – asks that there be a certain time when we detach ourselves from our daily routine, a time that is ‘different’, a time for concentrating the major portion of the energies that each one of us possesses in striving for conversion. The Church asks moreover that this effort be lived by all Christians at the same time, that is, that it be a common striving in solidarity of all together. There are thus forty days for the return to God, for repudiating idols that entice but at the same time alienate, for a better knowledge of the Lord’s infinite mercy.

Conversion, in fact, is not an event that happens once and for all, but is rather a dynamism that must be renewed in different moments of existence, at different ages, especially when the passing of time can induce the Christian to yield to worldliness, to fatigue, to a loss of the sense and the end of his own vocation, all of which lead him to live his faith schizophrenically. Lent is a time for recuperating one’s own truth and authenticity even before being a time of penance: it is not a time of ‘doing’ some particular work of charity or of mortification, but a time for recuperating the truth of one’s own being. Jesus declares that hypocrites also fast, that hypocrites also do acts of charity (cf. Mt 6, 1-6. 16-18): this is why it is necessary to unify one’s life before God and put in order the end and means of the Christian life without mistaking them.