Dear Brothers and Sisters:
One more time, in Lent this year 2021 we will hear in the Church the voice that will invite us to conversion. Like Jesus, she proclaimed: "The Kingdom of God is near, convert and believe in the Gospel " (Mc. 1,15). To become means, indeed, fundamentally turn to God in faith and charity. It also means making love the central norm of Christian life and of our relationships with the men and women of today, our brothers. Christian conversion is not reduced to a change in attitudes or a reform of our customs and behaviors, to a carnival-religious makeup but to a serious and joyful review to question ourselves about our adherence to Christ, his Gospel and his Church.
Lent begins when people open our hearts to God, We believe in the salvation that is offered to us and we allow his grace to configure our entire personal and community life. We can have as a backdrop in this Lenten season the words of the prophet Joel: "Tear hearts and not garments" (Jl. 2, 12-18). Conversion is not a little "patch" (Mc. 2, 21), but a line that crosses and hurts the interests oriented to ourselves and points to a concrete revision of our life, to a confrontation of my life with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Liturgical time to look at our “soul” and find ourselves:
1. To God I live , Christ, as Father and Friend, that comes out every day to meet me, surrounds me with his arms, don't ask about my past, he doesn't want my humiliation, give me a new suit and some new sandals, orders to put another silverware on the family table and simply says: "Let's celebrate a party banquet" (Lc. 15, 11-24 ). He cares more about my future than my sins of yesterday, always look forward and never back. Confessing your sin to someone who loves you is not shameful or humiliating, but source of new freedom. He seeks us as Father and Creator by our own name so that we may come out of our nakedness and meet the truth of His great love. (Gn. 3, 8-10).
2. With others not as strangers and far away, but close and companions of time and history, children of the same God and brothers by right. Meeting others implies living the deep dialogue of love, is to feel the other at the table of my life and make him a member of "my house".
3. Is finding myself, that maybe sometimes I'm a little puzzled like needing to know again who I am and where I'm going. May the Lord reconcile me to myself. May your tenderness restore my confidence in myself and make me exist in my own eyes. I can't find and love others, if I don't even find myself and I love myself. May the Lord help me to accept my poverty, my limitations and, Nevertheless, called to always improve myself. May this time impel me under the light of God's gaze, the impulse of His Spirit and the strength of his Word to get back on the road with gratitude for yesterday, with passion for the present and with confidence for the future. Conversion is inseparable from penance and spiritual suffering, experienced by someone who knows his own sin. Faced with the new challenges that have loomed on the horizon of our history due to a word called coronavirus, God and man have to meet to travel together the path of our time. Mary, the mother of the lord, who knew how to believe and hope, despite the questions that arose in his heart (Lc. 1, 26-38). Can be, in these difficult times for faith, our best model and guide to listen to the Word of God and welcome it in our hearts under the impulse of the Holy Spirit.
With my affection and blessing your Father Rolando