We began the season of Lent this past Feb. 14, precisely on Valentine’s Day, a day of love and friendship. What better time to begin this season with the true love of Jesus in His self-giving for us!
I am writing this just after the fifth Sunday of Lent. We have made progress. This would be a good time to pause and evaluate if Lent is actually leading us to conversion – that is, a radical change in our living that is effecting a profound change in our life – or if nothing is happening.
There is still time. I could talk about different conversions: for example, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, Zacchaeus and the “good thief.” Do I have the capacity to transform, in a radical and substantial way, the values by which I orient my existence? Do I have the possibility of overcoming a vice, a prejudice, a tendency that for years has negatively marked my personality, damaging my health and harming my good relationship with others?
These are not minor questions, and their most frequent answers are along the lines of fatalistic conformism, passive resignation, letting the law of inertia act: “I am like this. I’m too old to change.”
I feel in me neither the capacity nor the will to even try to change. So, if I am a smoker, alcoholic, drug addict, blasphemer and impenitent backbiter; if I refuse to let go of a family grudge, envy, anger, resentment, revenge; if any erotic stimulus, any suggestion or invitation, any opportunity or door that is opened to me finds in me immediate acceptance, without caring about the decencies or loyalties that I will be discarding along the way; if my appetite to know God and to approach intimacy with Him and obedience to His commands clashes with my studied indifference and shrugging of shoulders, and I become someone who cares nothing for Him, then I can only look at myself in a mirror and honestly acknowledge: “Ah, yes, so I am and so I will be.” How terribly sad is my childish mentality when my need is for conversion!
Lent is about becoming more conscious of what God intends for me to change. I take this time to tell myself how I am not honoring that which belongs to what is most specific to the human being: my capacity to change, to overcome, to be transformed. This is my need for conversion.
And Lent is the time of conversion. Taking it seriously requires us to stop and think. What is there in me that needs to change? From what, and to what do I need to change?
I invite you to make this time, which is too quickly over, to search for a better version of yourself.
How do I try to do it? I make a resolution to change, for me personally that would be to intentionally examine the things I do, the conversations I have, the words I use. I strive to prepare and do my work better, to root out my sources of conflict, to strive more for transparency of my life. I try to not stumble repeatedly over the same temptation.
I pray to be humble and open to asking for help from those who know more than me. And I wish you who are reading this a true conversion during these remaining days of Lent, so that we may become more and more transparent for God.
Deacon Enedino Aquino is Hispanic Ministry coordinator for the Greensboro Vicariate.