First Sunday of Lent

Today's Mass Readings

Several years ago, we constructed the new seminary dormitory, Good Shepherd Hall. It was a welcome upgrade, but the building process happened to be going on right next to the seminary chapel. During each morning meditation period where the seminarians and formation personnel were dutifully being good boys, praying in silence, we would hear the bangs and clangs of beams locking into joint and workmen yelling.

However, the most common construction-related noise was the beeping of work vehicles. The ambience to trying to quietly contemplate the Word of God was: beep – beep – beep. Then, occasionally two machines would start beeping in an offset echo drone: beep-eep, beep-eep, beep-eep. I would think to myself, “This is so annoying! Lord, don’t they understand that we’re trying to pray?” And just as it was becoming like Chinese Water Torture in a relentless drip of beeping into my skull – it would stop! Then I’d say to myself, “Oh come on, I was just getting used to that.” Reflecting on this experience, I understand that it takes very little distraction for fickle humans to fall away from God.

Christ’s temptations in the desert are real. We may think that Jesus could withstand anything being God. Yet He is also fully human, with all the attendant pitfalls awaiting humanity, although He did not sin. It may not have been Satan’s objective to make Christ worship Him, but simply to distract from His mission of establishing a heavenly kingdom and instead merely providing temporal goods that are not everlasting.

How easy it is to be distracted from the ultimate good! Pope Francis says that the most obvious example of this is the temptation to turn stones into bread, and thereby, displacing human dignity in its totality reducing it only to function. This change in mindset, he says, that would quickly turn stones into bread for the poor will as easily turn them back into stones which we cast at sinners, the weak, and the sick. (If we do not think this is real, we need only look at other countries with socialized healthcare—a total earthly safety net—that are now advocating assisted suicide for the many elderly and gravely sick who are too expensive for the system.)

Our word “devil” comes from diabolos, which means “the slanderer,” the one who backbites and speaks against God. The devil does not need us to reject the Lord outright, to deny gospel truths, or even to stop going to church; all Satan needs to do is to distract us from eternal goals, to remain fixated on temporal anxieties. To take a break from the apparent stress of living by numbing in doom scrolling social media, to focus on productivity instead of time spent in prayer, to obsess about health as an excuse to not pray or turn in charity to others, or perhaps most insidiously, to make my spiritual practices an idol instead of risking evangelization. Here we hear Christ’s parable of the Sower: “The seed sown among thorns is the one who hears the word, but then worldly anxiety and the lure of riches choke the word and it bears no fruit” (Matt. 13:22).

Lent is a time when we strip away these distractions to better fight temptations. A lack of temptation does not make us actively holier. For that, we need grace and renewed faith, hope, and love. The British writer, convert, and notoriously difficult person, Evelyn Waugh once said, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being.” Lent is an opportunity to renew our identity as beloved sons and daughters of our heavenly Father and His care for us. And so we embrace the Cross, trusting Christ provides abundant life now, for the ultimate glory to come.

Reflection Question: What is one change in behavior that would fight distractions in prayer, fellowship, and spreading the gospel? What is one change in behavior I can do to grow in trust that God will provide what I need for peace and flourishing?

Reflection by Fr. Pachomius Meade, OSB