Lent Station Masses
St. Columba’s, Renfrew.  Thursday after Ash Wednesday
 
Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you as we begin our Lenten journey into Easter. 
 
The Liturgy sees this season of Lent as a gift of grace to us from God, so that our time of waiting for the Easter feast can be one filled with interior joy.  It is truly a joy to watch the Lenten grace purify our minds from all the clutter of life and rekindle in us a desire for prayer and works of charity. This season of Lent is a time for us to be reborn as real sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.
 
Of course, this season is also one of dying.  It is a time for us to die to anything not from God in our lives so that we can truly live in the daylight of His promises.  In these six short weeks we will renew our discipleship of the Lord. This means taking up the Crosses of our daily lives, and sacrificing any selfish hopes and dreams and follow along the path of our God given vocation.  If we live in families we do not need to look beyond our front door to find our Cross.  For husbands and wives, mums and dads the Cross is found in accepting and offering up our daily round of worries about putting food on the table and a roof over the family’s head.  We embrace our Cross in the fatigue of our work in tending to the wellbeing and goodness of our children.  If you are old your Cross is offered in the loneliness of life and the fading health of your body.  If you are young you take up your Cross by being countercultural, by living your lives differently from your peers, following the way of purity of heart and avoiding the path of worldly pleasure and popularity. 
 
Yet, for all that, this path of Lent which seems at first sight to put so much dying before our eyes where so many other attractive choices abound, this path is nonetheless the path of prosperity for our real selves and our deepest desires within. It is the path of friendship with God, of serenity in soul, of joy in heart, of life and blessings in increasing measure.   
 
This season of Lent is a time where the Lord draws us to prayer in our private room, or in our interior life, which is the one that counts most.  So, we make time every day for our own personal prayer.  Every day our Heavenly Father calls us to Himself in prayer and we know it in our desire to be with Him, to be one with Him, lifting our hearts and minds from ordinary things of the day to enjoy personal intimacy with Him.
 
In prayer Abraham heard God speaking to Him and found the assurance to do the Father’s will even when it seemed to mean the loss of his son. In prayer Moses found God to be a friend he could talk to face to face.  In prayer David sang songs to God and learned to trust that God kept His promises. 
 
In prayer the Lord Jesus found God to be His Father.  In His busy life Jesus found time to pray long and often, day and night, frequently taking Himself off to quiet places to feel His Father’s consolation and learn His will.  Jesus taught is that our prayer is effective only when we come to God with the purity of hearts set on His Kingdom and holding no grudges against our brothers.  Jesus taught us how His Father hears our prayer when we make it with the bold confidence of a child and with the watchfulness that avoids temptation. 
 
The child Jesus learned how to pray in His family home with Mary and Joseph, their home always a place of prayer.  I urge you to make your own homes places of family prayer, simple prayers in the morning and at night, before and after meals. 
 
We have so much to bring to prayer; prayer that blesses God for His goodness to us, prayer that adores His majesty, prayer of petition for our needs of body and soul, prayer of intercession for others, prayer of thanksgiving for the many favours we have received from God’s good hands. And we have so many sources of prayer to help us pray; from the Scriptures to Holy Mass, from the gifts of faith, hope and love to the ordinary situations that life throws up.  And so many forms of prayer, from the vocal prayers -or saying our prayers – to meditation on the Word of God, to the simple contemplative gaze on the face of God in silence and love.  In all these many paths the one Way of our prayer is always Christ Our Lord and the one Master of our prayer is the Holy Spirit. 
 
This Lent we enter into the battle of prayer sure to be assailed by many obstacles from shortness of time or the sense that prayer is a waste of precious time to the temptation that the Lord does not listen to our prayers when, in fact, He hears every single one and answers every single one.  No doubt our prayer can be weighed down with distractions and dryness and the Temper is always there. But if we do not pray daily our hearts all too easily begin to stray and find other gods to take the place of the Lord and entice us onto the path that perishes.
 
The Lord reminds us today that if we want to be His disciples we have to be like Him, and He, above all, was a man of prayer.  So this Lent let us cling to the Lord in prayer, fall in love with Him and the path of blessings and life.
 
We turn to Mary Our Mother, whose own prayer was full of the joyful thanksgiving of the poor who see their hopes met in the Lord who keeps His promises and ask Her to teach us how to pray even as She taught Her Son in Nazareth.
 
 
 
For you have given your children a sacred time for the renewing and purifying of their hearts that, freed from disordered affections, they may so deal with the   things of this passing world as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.
 
For you will that our self-denial should give you thanks, humble our sinful pride, contribute to the feeding of the poor, and so help us imitate you in your kindness.
 
For through bodily fasting you restrain our faults, raise up our minds, and bestow both virtue and its rewards, through Christ our lord.