Dear Friends in Christ,
For the past six weeks, we have been walking with Jesus on our Lenten journey, accompanying the Lord as we prepare for Holy Week and its culmination on Easter, the great feast of our salvation. Lent is a season of challenge and penance, a drama of spiritual yearning in which our need for God is laid bare and we come face to face with the reality that we are in desperate need of God’s mercy and grace. It is foremost a season of pilgrimage, a spiritual sojourn in which our thirst is quenched by the Lord who always rushes to envelop us in his loving embrace.
Lent provides us with a unique opportunity for spiritual progress. To this end, three spiritual practices lie at the foundation of the Lenten season: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Of these, prayer holds a preeminent place as a means of communion with the Lord. Prayer is simple: it is a lifting of the mind and heart to God, a glance to heaven in which we see and are seen by the Lord who knows us. During Lent, prayer takes on a special focus as we contemplate the Paschal Mystery and meditate upon the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord. There is no prayer more efficacious in helping us contemplate the life of Christ than the Rosary. Pope St. John Paul II called the Rosary “a compendium of the Gospel.” It is the privileged prayer by which the Christian people “sit at the school of Mary” to contemplate the beauty of her Son.
As we enter Holy Week and prepare to accompany the Lord in his Passion, I invite you to take up your Rosary and spend time meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries. There is no better way to heed the Lord’s command to “watch and pray” with him in his hour of trial. As we kneel alongside Jesus in Gethsemane and follow him on the road to Calvary, we do so with lively faith and unwavering hope, knowing that even the horror of death must submit to the power and love of God. As the Holy Cross Constitutions remind us, “There is no failure the Lord’s love cannot reverse, no humiliation He cannot exchange for blessing…All is swallowed up in victory” (Constitution 8:118). What was true for the Lord is true also for us: we, too, are destined for resurrection and Easter joy. Nothing in our lives remains outside of God’s power to heal and restore; nothing and no one is beyond hope or outside of God’s providential care. Brothers and sisters, as we conclude this Lenten season and join our Lord on this road from Golgotha to glory, let us do so with our rosaries in hand, allowing our Blessed Mother to take us by the hand and let us into the arms of Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord. Be assured of my prayers for you and your families as together we march with confidence to the glory and joy of Easter morning.
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