The Pursuit of Love: Homily for Ash Wednesday

When I was a little boy, Lent was seen as the period of sacrifice, and where there was a tendency to keep a long face. It was a season of privation and one was not encouraged too much of mirth. Mirth was the domain of Carnaval which must not intrude into Lent.

I think there is a great value to this approach to Lent, but later in my youth I also encountered the Muslim attitude to Ramzan – incidentally Ramzan is ongoing, and so this Lent, we will be fasting alongside our Muslim brothers. If the attitude towards Lent in my childhood was one of sighing, and grudging, because we would be giving up alcohol, meat, chocolates and other things we like, I was surprised to realise that for the Muslims, Ramzan is a period of joy. One looks forward to Ramzan, and the fasting that accompanies it. Of course, unlike us who abstain through the entire period of Lent, they also feast after the fast. Having encountered this Muslim attitude, I realized that I had to change something about my attitude to Lent, that I had to look forward to it with joy and say when Ash Wednesday arrives, “Welcome, oh blessed season of Lent!”

And there is a good reason for us to do so, for not only are we preparing for the great, the biggest, feast of Easter, but in the process, Lent opens up a period of great opportunity for us.

A couple of days ago I chanced upon a video on social media of a Carmelite foundation, and they referred to Lent as “the pursuit of love.” This formulation of the season of penitence, abstinence and prayer, made me stop and think, this is what Lent is. At the very end of Lent we have Good Friday, which is the expression of the greatest act of love; a sinless man suffers a torture, shame, and a cruel death, so that ungrateful sinners – and the fact is, too many of us are still ungrateful and uncaring – may receive the greatest gift of the Father’s love, eternal life at His side.

If Lent is about this responding to this act of love, therefore, we cannot approach it with anything else other than an attitude of joy.

One more thing, the fasts and abstinence of Lent is not a bitter pill that we must swallow once a year. If this is going to be our attitude to Lent, then we are not going to make much spiritual progress. The abstinence of Lent should not be a prelude to gluttony starting from Easter Sunday. Avoiding pornography through this holy forty days, should not lead me to excitedly return to it on Easter Sunday and thereafter. Rather, the exercise of Lent should prepare me to eventually stop pornography altogether, even if it takes a few years, or place that consumption in its proper place – eat meat just once a week, for example.

Guided by love, we realise that the fasts of Lent are, in fact, exercises to help us gain true freedom. Many of us might look at the fasts, and prohibition of Lent, as curbing our freedoms, but in fact, these exercises, like any kind of exercise, actually places a regime on us that allows us to be freer. Once we are free of the vices, and the excesses, of our regular lives, we can more easily turn to a life of Christian virtue, and more easily open our hearts up to Our Lord, who wants nothing more than to be with us, both here and in heaven. As we hear in the first reading today:

Even now, says the LORD,

return to me with your whole heart,

with fasting, and weeping, and mourning

I normally end my homilies recommending a little ejaculatory prayer that should accompany us all the time. Today, at the start of this great season of Lent I recommend to you the words of the great St. Alphonsus Ligouri, which echoes the response of the psalm:

I love you, Jesus; my love above all things; I repent with my whole heart for having offended Thee. Never permit me to separate myself from Thee again.

Let these words strengthen you whenever you are tempted away from your Lenten discipline and from the great feast of love that awaits all of us at the end of this blessed period.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Caranzalem on 5 March 2025.)

(Image reference: “Santa Face”, El Greco, 17^th cent. Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon.)