Let us kill in our hearts that which is keeping the new person from being born, the person who can build a civilization of love.
While Lent is a time to seek austerity and sacrifice, this is not because self-denial is the end in itself. Instead, this self-denial is a path to grow in freedom: As the Catechism says, self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery are "the preconditions of all true freedom."
It's also because suffering is a part of human life, and yet God has made it a source of grace. Imagine what a conquest over evil! Suffering entered the world only because of the devil's trickery, and now God tricks him back, by taking his tool and using it against him!
St. Oscar Romero, who is celebrated on March 24, was realistic about suffering:
Suffering will always be. It is a heritage of the first sin and a consequence of the other sins that God permits, even after the redemption. But the redemption converts them into power of salvation when suffering is undergone in union of faith, hope, and love with the Redeemer’s divine suffering and cross. Suffering is the shadow of God’s hand, which blesses and pardons; and suffering unites people in solidarity and draws them near to God.
The martyr-saint, who lived in the midst of the great suffering of poverty and corruption, has a word for us this Holy Week that is particularly resonant. It is advice for a Holy Week that will be lived in war:
Holy Week is a call to follow Christ’s austerities,
the only legitimate violence,
the violence that he does to himself
and that he invites us to do to ourselves:
“Let those who would follow me deny themselves,”
be violent to themselves,
repress in themselves the outbursts of pride,
kill in their hearts the outbursts of greed,
of avarice, of conceit, of arrogance.
Let them kill it in their hearts.This is what must be killed,
this is the violence that must be done,
so that out of it a new person may arise,
the only one who can build
a new civilization:
a civilization of love.
St. Oscar Romero, pray for us. Pray for peace.
