Lent Station Masses
St. Mary’s Greenock, Week One Tuesday
 
Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you as we begin our Lenten journey into Easter. 
 
In our Lenten Masses so far we have been reflecting upon how this season, as the Liturgy points out to us, is a precious gift to us from God.  He wants our time of waiting for the Easter feast to be filled with interior joy and growing expectation.  It is truly a joy for us to watch the Lenten graces purifying our minds from all the dross accumulated in our lives and to see God’s grace bring back to life in us a fresh desire for prayer and inkling to contribute to works of charity. Yes, this season of Lent is a time for being reborn as a Church, and each one of us personally as disciples, so that we can experience again the consolation of being true sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.
 
The Preface for Lent reminds us that one of this first gifts of this season in purifying our minds from selfish desires is that it arouses in us a new generosity for contributing to works of charity and almsgiving. 
 
In our catechesis at yesterday’s Station Mass we remembered that our Christian spirituality is a spirituality of prayer and fasting and giving alms, a triple corded rope by which God lifts us out of the darkness of sin and into the brightness of His presence.  We saw how our own times have lost sight of this triple cord, and focus too exclusively just on giving, as if Lent was not also about giving up.  Saint Augustine reminded us how prayer is like a bird wanting to fly to God and it cannot do so without its two wings of  fasting and almsgiving.
 
The catechesis of our first two Station Masses focussed on prayer and fasting in our daily lives as Christians.  This evening we round off the cycle by reflecting on almsgiving in our discipleship of Christ.
 
Through the prophet Isaiah the Lord reminds us that ‘ just as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating’ so He expects that His word will not return to Him empty handed.  The word He speaks to us looks for an abundant harvest of good works from us in charity and mercy. 
 
When Jesus teaches His disciple to pray, He asks them to address Him as My Father but to Our Father so that they remember we are all His family and each of us our brother’s keeper.  He asks us to pray that we all have our daily bread, and calls us to do our bit, as far as we are able, to make sure it is so. 
 
The Lord commanded us to love our neighbour. To the young man who asked if Faith could be reduced to just one great commandment Jesus taught Him it could only go down to two, and no less.  Yes, the greatest was to love God, but to love your neighbour as yourself was just as important and even necessary.
 
And this means, first of all, that we love our brothers and sisters who are in need.  The Catechism reminds us that God blesses those who help the poor and that He rebukes those who turn away from them: He commands us to: Give to him who begs from you and never to not refuse him who would borrow from you because we ourselves received without charge when we were in need of redemption from our sins and so must give without charge whenever someone needs our help.  In the end it is by how we loved done the poor that Jesus Christ will recognize us as His true disciples.
 
The Catechism teaches us that the Church's love for the poor has been part our constant and unbroken tradition and it was inspired, above all, by seeing of Jesus Himself poor, and by taking seriously His Gospel that blessed the poor, as well as reflecting upon the Lord’s own preferential love for the poor of Palestine.  Ever since, the Church has had a preferential love for all those weighed down by poverty and need.
 
Brothers and sisters, we cannot love the poor as long as we have immoderate attachment to riches in our own lives. A good test of whether we are too attached to my things is to ask ourselves if we are happy to share them with others.  Saint John Chrysostom warns us if we do not allow the poor to share in our goods we are stealing from them because the things we possess are not ours, but God’s and He wants them to be enjoyed by all His family.  
 
That is why Lent is a good time for us to remind ourselves of the corporal works of mercy God requires of each of us, which are the works of charity by which we feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, and bury the dead.  
 
Dear brothers and sisters, when Jesus met with human misery it brought out only compassion in Him.  He responded to it by taking it upon himself and making Himself a brother of the least of His brethren.  
 
Jesus remined us that the poor would be with us always and God’s people have always found ways to be charitable, from the Jubilee Years of forgiveness of debts and the prohibition of high interest rates, to ensuring payment of wages on time. They have always found creative ways of answering God’s call to: Open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in the land.
 
Let us turn to Our Lady Who shows us the way.  No sooner had She heard the dizzying news from the Angel Gabriel that She, of all women, had been chosen to be the Mother of the Messiah than She immediately forgets Herself and goes on an errand of charity to Her cousin Elizabeth who, in her older years conceiving a son, needed Her aid.  We ask Her to teach us this Lent how to go beyond any lingering selfish concern for ourselves, and make the arduous journey our of ourselves to find God especially in the face of the poor.