Let your heart be broken this Lent

By Br Simeon Banda FMS

As we enter the 2010 Lenten season, we recall the most catching words that inspire these 40 days: almsgiving, fasting, prayer, ashes, Stations of the Cross, abstinence, giving up, Palm Sunday and Holy Week.

Every year at Matola Marist novitiate in Mozambique we come up with a community Lenten project. Before sharing on the topic, our Brother Veteran, Mansoa, briefs us on the significance of this liturgical period in our life as Christians.

Those of us familiar with the Israelite’s history associate the 40 days of Lent with the 40 years in the desert filled with the people’s murmurings against Moses. And we associate Lent with Jesus’ 40 days in the desert, with the three temptations, before beginning the public ministry.

The Lenten period provides us with a great opportunity for conversion and believing in the Good News. That is why at the end of the season we always renew our baptismal promises, denying wholeheartedly all of Satan’s temptations and traps, and our catechumens are welcomed as new-born babies in the family of faith. The  Lenten season is important for the whole Church: those already baptised and those awaiting baptism. That is to say, all of us enter the conversion process.

“Let your hearts be broken, not your garments torn,” the prophet Joel said (Joel 2:12-18). The idea of “fasting, weeping, mourning” comes up in this text too. Almsgiving, giving up, abstinence help us to come out of the world of being greedy and being mean to emerge with an extreme generosity. Love becomes victorious over greed. Our hearts will be broken when we see poor Africans dying of hunger created by the dry spell. How can our hearts fail to be broken when others are victims of destitution and starvation?

When we finish the period of Lent without a concrete example of charity, it means only our garments were torn, but our hearts never were broken by seeing the many miserable people around us.

Lent helps us to alleviate the suffering of our neighbours. In the Chichewa language, we say: “Pepani sapoza chilonda” — “Sorry does not heal nor cure a wound”. The letter of James has strong words on this too. He wants faith that is put into practice. Lent should help us demonstrate faith in charitable and practical activities. This is so because where there is charity, there is God. In this way, faith and charity are bound together.

So when our Lenten period comes to end and we have not been charitable enough towards the less privileged, we place a big question mark next to ourselves. Can we be mere spectators towards the unfortunate neighbours after the 40 days of Lent? If we are just spectators, we betray the spirit of Lent which ought to generate compassion in us, made visible through charity.

The ashes that we have smeared on our foreheads on the first day of Lent should help us go deep into the conversion process and make us more generous towards our destitute brothers and sisters. Our charity ought to be inclusive, directed at all who suffer.

Jesus told us: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me” (Mt 25:40). These words can carry more weight when the Lenten period generates in us a compassionate heart for those who are less privileged. We have to become Simons of Cyrene who help to carry the big crosses of others as they walk to their own calvary of untold miseries. We should be new Veronicas with handkerchiefs in our hands, drying faces of  those sweating with the misery of suffering — physical, mental, social, spiritual or material.

Let us pray that this Lenten season will make us double our generosity towards our suffering neighbours.

Marist Bother Simeon Banda is based in Matola, Mozambique.