From The Bishop

The Church has been blessed throughout the centuries to have great men and women who have touched the minds and hearts of countless generations by their spiritual writing and holiness of life. Blessed John Henry Newman is a very good example of this. In a beautiful reflection called The Mission of My Life he wrote, "God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me that He has not committed to another. I have my mission… He has not created me for naught. I shall do good. I shall do His work." This meditation is a good example for all of us as we approach the season of Lent. In the Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent (St. Mark) we read: "After he was baptized, the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness 40 days, tempted by Satan and he was with the wild beasts; and the Angels waited on Him." (Mark 1:12) We know that after the wilderness Jesus began his public ministry. This was the mission given to Him by His Heavenly Father. I am sure Jesus spent these days focusing on His mission because He wanted to do the will of the Father. Traditionally we are called to use these 40 days of Lent to follow the example of Jesus and 'enter the wilderness' with Him. This offers us a wonderful opportunity to reflect upon the 'mission of my Life'. Am I doing the Lord's work? Am I living out my baptismal call? It is the Sacrament of Baptism that unites us to Christ and invites us to share in His mission. And so, during Lent, we use the same tools that Jesus used after His baptism to help deepen our commitment to the mission: prayer, fasting and almsgiving. In a prayerful context we reflect upon our own mission of life. What am I doing to unite myself more fully to Christ and His Good News? How am I serving the Lord and trusting in His great mercy? We also discipline ourselves through fasting, which is to deny ourselves some pleasure, to help us focus on God and less on ourselves. It is simply saying 'no' to ourselves and 'yes' to God. The act of almsgiving allows us to be more generous with our time, talent, and treasure (financial resources) in the hope that we can alleviate the suffering of the poor and support the good work of the Church. Our faith teaches us that we are called to Live out a mission that has been entrusted to us by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Lent is a time to focus on that mission to see how we are doing. We take a spiritual inventory through our acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. We also humbly go to our God to receive mercy when we fail. As Pope Francis often reminds us, the Sacrament of Penance is one of the greatest means of celebrating that mercy in our lives. He says that God never tires of forgiving us; however, we often tire of asking for forgiveness. As a diocese both clergy and laity should make a commitment to use these 40 days of Lent as a time to focus on the mission entrusted to us. Our baptismal call is intimately connected to the mission of the Church, which is to go forth and proclaim the Good News and make disciples of all nations. In his own call to mission Blessed John Henry Newman understood this, "Yet i have a part in this great work; l am a link in the chain, a bond of connections between persons." He also said that to live is to change and to be perfect is to change often. Let us then use the days of Lent to change those things that keep us from perfectly living out the mission entrusted to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Published on The Vineyard Paper on February 2015 http://saintcd.com/the-diocese/diocesan-offices/the-vineyard-paper/book/28-the-vineyard-february-2015/1-vineyard.html