Dear brothers and sisters, it is a joy to be with you as we make our way through our Lenten journey into Easter. 
 
In our Station Masses so far we have reflected on how the season of Lent is God’s special gift to us because He wants our discipleship to be filled with gladness as we await with hope the coming of Our Saviour, Jesus Christ and the New Life He brings.  And it is truly a joy when we sense the Lenten grace raising our minds out of the mediocrity of ordinary life and enkindling in us a fresh zeal to follow the Lord even more closely than ever in discipleship.  The season of Lent summons us to rebirth, as a Church and personally as Christ’s followers, so as to share the fulness of His companionship as sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father.
 
In yesterday’s Station Mass we reflected upon how Jesus declared Himself to be something greater than Jonah and all the Prophets of the Old Testament , a wisdom greater than Solomon, and a clearer sign of the Heavenly Father’s Kingdom to our generation. 
 
We reflected upon how the path of discipleship Jesus invites us to enter is so much higher and nobler than the righteousness of the Pharisees. In fact, Jesus invites us to follow Him on the higher road of the evangelical counsels, in the Gospel life of simplicity in our personal lives, chastity in our relationships, and of obedience to some rule or plan of life in our spiritual affairs.
 
Following on from our Baptism this evangelical Way binds us more closely to Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, in His total dedication to His Father Whom He loved beyond all things, and it consecrates us more intimately to service in the Church.  
 
Yesterday we reflected upon the evangelical counsel of poverty or simplicity of life and saw that it leads us to a poverty of spirit that wants to be totally dependent on Jesus and to live by every word that comes from His Father’s mouth.  It is about wanting to feel how only God can satisfy the true hunger ever present inside our human heart.
 
Today we think of the second evangelical counsel, which is purity of heart, or chastity in our relationships, and the prayer of Queen Esther in the First Reading can help us understand what we mean by purity of herart. 
 
Esther had the good fortune in her youth to be the most beautiful young woman in the whole of her Kingdom, and so desirable that she won the hand of the great pagan king Ahasuerus in marriage.  Yet, living amid all the trappings of luxury and celebrity, she was not happy inside.  In love with God from her earliest days she abhorred the lusty ways of the king’s court and, opening her heart to her Lord and God she confessed herself his faithful servant alone, and her abiding sadness that she had found no joy since the day that she was brought to the court until now, except in Her Lord and God. In the midst of all the revelry she felt alone, attended by so many maids, she felt she has no real friend or companion in her crowd .  Come to my help, she pleaded, for I am alone and have no one but you, Lord.’
 
In Esther we can see the evangelical counsel of purity of heart shine brightly.  It is found in having the Lord as our first love and loving all others in Him.  It is found in our conviction that only in God is my soul at rest.
 
But if I take seriously the truth that only in God is my soul at rest, I will not put unrealistic expectations on those I love.  If I am in a relationship or married I will not look for my beloved to satisfy my every dream because only in God is my soul at rest. Instead I take my beloved for no more than a fellow disciple travelling with me along the road of the Gospel.  My happiness lies in looking for a companion, not for another God. 
 
Chastity, that so much misunderstood word, is not about abstaining from act of human love.  Chastity is not the same thing as celibacy, which abstains from marital acts.  Chastity is for all of us, married or otherwise, and it is about being pure in heart.   It is about being in possession of ourselves and our passions so that our passions do not get to be in possession of us. It is about being so self-possessed that we never use another to satisfy our own desires but only seek to give ourselves to our beloved in a way that helps them be good and find peace and make progress in holiness and the journey into God.
 
Like all the evangelical counsels chastity is a divine gift from our Lord that joins us to the Church and the mystery of our Faith in a special way. It allows us to devote ourselves more closely to Christ and so to extend the Kingdom of God in our world.   And we foster purity of heart through our prayer and through active works of the apostolate, coming together to help and strengthen each other.
 
Dear brothers and sisters in these awfully sad and shocking times of sexual abuse in the Church and of so many wounds to marriage and family life in our society, as well as so much confusion as to the truth and meaning of human sexuality as created and imagined by Our Heavenly Father, the full answer cannot be found only in enacting new laws or procedures, important though they may be.  The problem seems much deeper and goes to a rediscovery in our world and in all of us, of the gift and challenge of purity of heart.
 
Jesus said to his disciples, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. In matters of purity of heart and noble human love, when today’s ‘anything goes’ culture seems, in the end, to hand us only stones to bruise each other or snakes that seduce and deceive, we can ask Our Heavenly Father for His bread and fishes, and those good things of His that allow us to treat each other well,  and so lift up our loves on earth. 
 
We turn to Our Blessed Mother Mary, the Mother of Fair love Who, being first the handmaid of the Lord, was able to live Her life blessed in her betrothed love to her husband Joseph, full of grace in Her motherly love of Her family, and active in servant love to her of her kith and kin.