1.Do not get lazy or do not become installed in a place or in a determined way of life. Do not remain static or paralyzed. Experience teaches us that everything that moves should have a direction and in the road is necessary to correct the direction for avoiding being wrong or loosing the way. So we may conclude two things: a) As Lent asks of us to have a “wanderer’s soul”, it is also an invitation to not hide ourselves behind the usual “I’m like that”. We must “born again” as Jesus told Nicodemus, and b) it has to do with keep walking and living the conversion process, that is to say to set right our steps to God
2.To make reality the wise adage: “everything that does not help hinders”. For packing our suitcase for a walk we have to be convinced of that reality. It means that you should know how to select, to remove and to clean. The practice of mortification and penance (Lent’s invitation), words so characteristic of Lent time, is the art of killing everything that hinders us to walk towards life, to the resurrection with Jesus.
3.To enable us to better interpret the road map or itinerary that will guide us to the goal or destiny we want to reach. In the desert of life we could find many false oasis or multiples mirages. Saint John of the Cross writes about that in the song 18 of his Spiritual Canticle:
“You nymphs of Judea,
while among flowers and roses
the amber spreads its perfume,
stay away, there on the outskirts:
do not so much as seek to touch our thresholds” .
Prayer is essential for living all this. Without prayer (this is another deep and constant invitation of the time of Lent) is not possible to know the Will = the Way of the Lord, much less to have the necessary strength to follow that will or that way. If we are not able to discern this way by prayer, we may lose ourselves and we may become entangled with many mirages on the road to Easter.
4.To feel ourselves as a living part of “people on a Journey”, a community that goes forward, where all its members together may find the city that does not end, the eternal city. We had to experience that even in the desert we do not go alone: some go at our side, others are ahead of us, others behind of us. With a few we walk side to side. To walk together is to look at each one of those brothers’ faces, to live in solidarity, to share our provisions (the exercise of alms is another Lenten invitation).
There is no doubt that our lives are threatened very often by the experience of the desert, the bitterness, pain or suffering. Lent invites us to keep walking in spite of everything, and, little by little, we discover that God is present in our troubled heart. Thus comes “the calm which is a very intense activity, the silence filled with the Word of God, the confidence that no longer fears, the security that no longer needs any guaranty and the force which is powerful in the impotence: in conclusion, the life that is born with death (…) [Jesus on the cross at] each moment seemed to be drowning. But the great miracle happened, his voice continued. The Son moved by that imperceptible voice, like a dead man, to the terrible God: Father – said in his abandonment: ‘Thy will be done!” And he gave his soul with inexpressible courage into the Father’s hands.
Since then our poor soul is also in the hands of this God, this Father whose death decree has become thus love. Since then, our despair is saved; the emptiness of our heart has reached its plenitude, and the remoteness of God, is our land” .(3)
P. Milton Multon ocd
1. Christianity, in its origins, was known by the name of “the Way” (Acts 18.25-26). It was not exactly entering a new religion, but mainly to find the right and successful way of life, which means to live following in the footsteps of Jesus. We can make the equation: be Christian = following Jesus Christ. This is fundamental and irreplaceable. This means that being a Christian is to follow Jesus Christ, to move, to take steps forward, to walk or to build one’s existence following the footsteps of the Master, in whom we fix always our eyes.
Mk 10:46-52 (The blind man of Jericho). It is a fundamental text that invites us to get over our blindness. At the beginning of the Gospel story, the blind “was sitting by the road.” He was blind, disoriented, out of the way and unable to follow Jesus. But when Jesus healed him of his blindness, the blind man regained his eyesight, but above all, he became a true follower of his Master, and from that moment “followed him on the way.”
2. Nymphs as a sign of fair love, but wrong, fragile and open to deception, which can lead human beings to illusion, temptation and away from the strong asceticism of love that demands to leave all. The illusion of one moment, the immediate joy that fascinates, but at the end you experience the emptiness. The believer who lives a searching process and is on the way, and wants to totally fulfill oneself in love, can not remain in the game of little loves, can not be looking for ways and transitory beauties, can not entertain fantasies and dreams that end up for destroying or drying his enormous emotional capacity. St. John of the Cross knows that as humans beings we cultivate nymphs, we get absorbed by illusions and we deceive ourselves with passing values of this world. He doesn’t condemn the nymphs, but he asks them to stay out, “dwelling in the suburbs” outside the space where love spreads its perfume.
The nymphs are a risk to the lovers, and therefore, should be put out, and indeed there is no love without expulsion. Without a serious commitment, intimate and personal, of purification, without putting out the nymphs) is not possible to continue and successfully complete the way we have begun. It is the transforming experience of God that it is lived in two ways: annihilator in one direction and re-creative, ie irruption of God in man’s life that overcomes a previous life (death), and starts a new life (new life / resurrection).
3. RAHNER, Karl, The liturgical year, Herder, Barcelona 1966, pp. 66-68.
Lent is a time of preparation for living in a Christian way the Easter Season. Lent is a liturgical time. In it we are invited to intensify our life of conversion to God and to others. Conversion asks for a change of mentality; to let go of the “old man” (who is worn out and enslaved by the vices and sins) in order to become “new men”, those who, strengthened in Christ with a new vitality, has passed from the death to life, to the risen life.
Lent is a road to Easter. It is the way of conversion, and therefore, it is not static. This way requires dynamism and a process that, little by little, will indentify us with the person of Jesus . So that way the road to Easter calls us, as evoke it by the very word road, to posses a wanderer’s soul. To posses a wanderer’s soul implies: