He loves your soul dearly, cling to Him, and trust Him, He so longs to be trusted.

COMMENT: Many of us have a very weak trust in God. The saints were not like us. Their faith and trust in God’s Providence was simple and profound and it was this reliance on God that allowed them to achieve so much.

Lent is a time for spiritual discipline. This discipline is not driven by an adherence to an abstract or arbitrary set of rules. Rather, we follow the discipline of Lent because we love Christ and because we want to show this love, because we want to follow Christ’s command to perfect ourselves and because we want to strengthen ourselves to avoid sin.

Fr Doyle, referring to his then spiritual director Venerable Adolphe Petit SJ, wrote the following in his diary:

The reason, said Fr Petit, why we find our life so hard, mortification difficult, and why we are inclined to avoid all that we dislike, is because we have no real love for Jesus.

As we journey through Lent, let us remember that our penances are really about loving Christ and not just “giving things up” out of habit.