;)
“Immediately afterwards the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness, and he remained there for forty days and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him.” Mark“As some may be surprised to learn, Ash Wednesday is not the beginning of Lent, but only the beginning of the lenten fast.
“The liturgical time of Lent begins on the following Sunday, and here the liturgy has a different character. It is more ancient and therefore more objective. The structure of the Sunday Mass is loftier and more noble in its splendidly simple architecture. Nothing is said about how a sinner feels, and the question of any possible conflict between the mercy and justice of God is not raised. All is bathed in the same pure light of the wilderness where Christ the Lord fasts in solitude and is tempted by the devil.
“The dramatic, medieval rites of Ash Wednesday may perhaps make a stronger and more immediate appeal to our feelings. The Mass of the first Sunday however leads us deeper into the real mystery of Lent, uniting us more profoundly and more directly with the Christ who, praying and fasting in us, will purify us and offer us together with himself to the Father in the glory of his Easter victory.” Thomas Merton
“The whole Christian community is always assembled in greater numbers on Sundays, and so on the first Sunday in Lent we have a sort of solemnized opening of the season of penance and fasting…The gospel gives us the keynote: We there have the example of Christ fasting forty days and his subsequent resistance to the temptations toward inordinate appetite of sense, pride of life, and lust for possessions--the three great enemies of human salvation.” Virgil Michel
“Hunger is our prime enemy, the basic biological need, and the sign of the radical poverty of our existence. As it becomes aware of the worldwide existence of hunger, contemporary public opinion is discovering it to be one of death’s more hideous masks.” Edmond Barbotin
“The spirit cannot endure the body when overfed, but, if underfed, the body cannot endure the spirit.” Francis de Sales
“St. Bonaventure said that after the long fast of our Lord in the desert, when the angels came to minister to him, they went first to the Blessed Mother to see what she had on her stove, and got the soup she had prepared and transported it to our Lord, who relished it the more because his mother had prepared it. Of course.” Dorothy Day
“Whether we gaze with longing into the garden or with fear and trembling into the desert, of this we can be sure--God walked there first! And when we who have sinned and despoiled the garden are challenged now to face the desert, we do not face it alone; Jesus has gone there before us to struggle with every demon that has ever plagued a human heart. Face the desert we must if we would reach the garden, but Jesus has gone there before us.”
James Healy
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