A Reflection For Lent 2014
“To be Seekers of God”
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Everyone is seeking something – something more – in life, for life, always! In our often fragmented world today we see people seeking all of the time and yet so often the seeking is misplaced in material, passing goods. The result of such seeking can lead to more emptiness rather than life-giving, life-generating meaning. The season of Lent provides us with a special time set aside for deepening our seeking and searching in life.
Perhaps I find myself in a difficult place or in a time of uncertainty, loss, boredom, mediocrity, joy, hope or longing. Lent is a time to bring my feelings, questions and longings to God in the very place in which I find myself. For God is a Seeker also! God is seeking me, God is seeking you. Always! God invites us into the Divine Presence with all of our feelings, our joys, our struggles, our everyday “grind”, our hopes and our desires for life. God asks us in the depths of our hearts: “What and whom do you seek”?
What and whom do you seek this Lent? What is in your heart? Like us, Jesus was a seeker of meaning in his life. In his humanity he didn’t know all the answers for his unfolding life and vocation. He too needed clarity to live out his call. So like his ancestors, the People of Israel, Jesus went into the desert to fast, to pray to search for the fullness of his meaning. In the desert, Jesus listened, he struggled, he was tempted, he risked, he was emptied and precisely because of the experience he came to know more clearly his call. Jesus emerged from the desert strengthened. He emerged from the desert to live a life of love and service to the end and then beyond to resurrection. Will I risk the desert this Lent, accompanied by Christ, to seek meaning in my life and the nature or strengthening of my call? In this graced season, what and whom do I seek that I might live fully into life, to love and serve to the end and in the hope of resurrection?