“We are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God.” (2 Corinthians 5: 20)
The first day of the liturgical season of Lent has been commemorated across the Archdiocese with the faithful flocking to traditional Ash Wednesday Masses to receive blessed ashes.
The ashes serve as a sign of the beginning of Lent and symbolise the dust from which God made us.
In the Perth CBD, a large congregation gathered at St Mary’s Cathedral to welcome the 40-day Lenten season during which Catholics are called to enter more deeply into the mystery of Jesus’s suffering, death and Resurrection at Easter.
In his homily, Deacon Greg Lowe, said Lent was about resisting the temptation to reject love.
“In the Gospel today, Jesus distils the command to love in a very practical way – give alms, pray, fast. In other words, love your neighbor, love God, and love yourself. This is what goodness, beauty and truth look like in the Christian life, and it is our calling given to us at baptism,” he said.
“To reconnect us with this priority to love, the Church gives us this sacred time of Lent and gently asks two things of us: repent and believe in the Gospel.
“To rid our lives of our sinfulness, we must fully accept that it is impossible to do so without God’s grace. To realise this is to enable repentant grace to seep into our very being for it alone has the power to lead us away from harsh attitudes, corrupt patterns of thinking, excessive and selfish behaviors.
“Let us ask for the graces of repentance and belief in the Gospel way of life of loving our neighbor, God, and ourselves in our Lenten journey. Then we will know what beauty, goodness and truth looks like for we will be living it.”
Lent provides Catholics with an opportunity to reflect on their faith journey and commit more fully to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
This was reflected in the annual Lenten message from Pope Leo XIV in which he called on the faithful to embrace fasting, show compassion towards each other, and place the mystery of God back in our lives.
“Lent is a time in which the Church, guided by a sense of maternal care, invites us to place the mystery of God back in the centre of our lives,” he said, “in order to find renewal in our faith and keep our hearts from being consumed by the anxieties and distractions of daily life.”
“Every path towards conversion begins by allowing the word of God to touch our hearts and welcoming it with a docile spirit. There is a relationship between the word, our acceptance of it and the transformation it brings about.
“For this reason, the Lenten journey is a welcome opportunity to heed the voice of the Lord and renew our commitment to following Christ, accompanying Him on the road to Jerusalem, where the mystery of His passion, death and resurrection will be fulfilled.
“Let us ask for the grace of a Lent that leads us to greater attentiveness to God and to the least among us. Let us ask for the strength that comes from the type of fasting that also extends to our use of language, so that hurtful words may diminish and give way to a greater space for the voice of others. Let us strive to make our communities places where the cry of those who suffer finds welcome, and listening opens paths towards liberation, making us ready and eager to contribute to building a civilisation of love,” he added.