Heart of stone or heart of flesh?

Fasting – from lack to fullness

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – TUESDAY THIRD WEEK

March 10 – Daniel 3: 25, 34-43; Matthew 18: 21-35

From lack to fullness – that is the project of our reflection for this week. And the Word yesterday invited us to look at the close connection between this fullness and humility… the movement towards fullness is essentially a movement from hardheartedness to humility, we reflected. Today, we have the Word indicating to us a formidable sign of this humility – a contrite heart, a broken spirit… which is diametrically opposed to hardheartedness; a heart of stone that has to be replaced with the heart of flesh.

The first element of this sign is the readiness to recognise our imperfections. At times we find it so had to say that we can be imperfect – we either think whatever we do is right or we are convinced that what we feel is right is absolutely right for everyone. This not only leads to an arbitrariness but also to a haughtiness that makes me consider everyone else subject to my judgement.

A second element of this sign is the admission of our imperfections. Even when we recognise a glitch within us, we might sometimes try so hard to hide it or cover it up that we end up reinforcing it and making it stronger than before and more harmful that earlier. Only a contrite heart will enable me to admit my mistake and ask for pardon, admit my imperfection and look for ways to grow up, admit my folly and make me submit myself to the graciousness of the other and that of the Other.

The third essential element of this sign is, as a just follow up of admitting my imperfection, permitting the imperfection of the other. A sincerely contrite heart will certainly recognise the contrition of the other. An honestly broken spirit will readily sense the brokenness of the other. An authentically humble person will respect with great regard a person who seeks forgiveness. This is the message that Jesus wants us to behold from the parable he narrates today – that we become persons who measure up to the forgiveness and compassion we have received from the merciful Lord, by being ourselves merciful towards the others.

Yesterday we reflected on the fact that humility alone can help us understand the reality of how we keep ourselves away from the absolute mercy of God, through our hearts of stones… when we allow this heart of stone to be replaced by a heart of compassion, we move definitively from lack to fullness.

 

 

 

From hardheartedness to humility!

Fasting – from lack to fullness

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – MONDAY THIRD WEEK

March 09 – 2 Kings 5: 1-15,18-20; Luke 4: 24-30

Fasting is a spiritual exercise that should enable us move from lack to fullness. The danger at times is that our spiritual practices make us either self-righteous spiritual recluses or self-trumpeting identity seekers! This is the sad fact that Jesus wants us to be aware of. We are reminded here to go back to those first three days of this season of lent, when the Word instructed us how our prayer, fasting and charity should be during lent, and what they should lead us towards.

Holy father when he speaks about fasting in his Lenten message of this year, he says “in order to practice fasting in accordance with its evangelical character and avoid the temptation that leads to pride, it must be lived in faith and humility.” There is, therefore, a very close affinity between spiritual practices and humility. The Word today brings out this message in a very concrete event narrated in the first reading and interpretatively referred to by Jesus in the Gospel – it is about Naaman.

Naaman in infuriated – not because Elijah refused to cure him, because he did not; not because Elijah maltreated him or called him names, because that never happened; not because Elijah asked for exorbitant remuneration to carry out the miracle of healing, because that was never a concern for Elijah. Naaman was angry because his ego was offended. He was not disrespected but he ‘felt’ insulted. He was not maltreated but he “felt” he was despised. He felt so, because his heart was hardened with pride and self-glory. His ego of a minister in the courts of the king was so big that he looked at the way Elijah treated him was belittling.

Elijah was clear about his stand – that he was not curing Naaman but the God of Israel was; that he would not want to have anything to do with the great political guest who has come but wanted his king not to despair on account of anyone. Elijah was acting on God’s behalf… and before God Naaman, justifiably, cannot hold on to his haughtiness; but his heart was hardened not to see the truth. Fortunately, a little bit of humility, put into his heart by his servants, brings him to healing, to wholeness, to salvation!

Fasting has to bring us to see the truth, to be grounded – that is to be humble. Humility alone can help us understand the reality of how we keep ourselves away from the healing grace of God, the love and compassion of God that makes us whole. When we move from hardheartedness to humility, we move gradually from lack to fullness.

 

 

 

FASTING... FROM LACK TO FULLNESS

Helplessness to hopefulness; hardheartedness to humility; hurt to hunger!

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

March 08 - Exodus 17: 3-7; Romans 5: 1-2, 5-8; John 4: 5-42

Listening and Fasting: Lent as a time for conversion... we have reached the third Sunday of the season. The last two weeks we have been reflecting on the term “Listening” and we now move towards the next term, “Fasting”! It is a central theme of reflection for us, every lent – what fasting really means and what significance it can have for our lives. We have a great lesson in the Word today, a lesson of some key themes – thirst or hunger; change of heart; and growing towards fullness!  Said therefore in one phrase, it is a movement from lack, a thirst or hunger, through a change of heart, towards a fullness that God offers us. This is what the Holy Father so simply puts in his Lenten message – to have a hunger to move from lack to fullness.

The first trace of this movement from lack to fullness has to be from helplessness to hopefulness: At times our fasting and abstinence remains merely an accentuation of our deprivation or self-deprivation. Our fasting has to be more a clarity about what we wish to fill ourselves with in stead of what we are claiming to renounce… we renounce eating, what do we wish to fill that space with – self pity and frustration? …we renounce meat and other desirable things but what do we fill that absence with – self-righteousness and rash judgement of others? This is what Jesus spoke against… it cannot be a lack which would only lead to a lament as we see in the first reading. If it has to be a spiritual act, it has to be hope-filled, that I have something, someOne with me who can give me that real fulfilment in life, who alone can lead me to fullness. This is hopefulness!

The Samaritan woman who was all the time looking so helplessly at her lack – lack of water, lack of a respectable identity in the public, lack of some one who would love her, lack of a sense of fulfilment – was gradually led by Jesus to look at the hope that he was intending to give her. Finally she does get it… she who was all the time asking for water so that her material need could be fulfilled, leaves her jar by the well and returns to the village – a powerful symbolism to say she had moved from helplessness to hopefulness.

A second sense of this movement from lack to fullness, is from hardheartedness to humility: meribah, massah, ‘even when we were still in sin’, ‘you a Jew who thinks you are greater than our father Jacob’… these are various elements of hard heartedness that we are presented with by the Word today. This is the hardheartedness of humanity – humanity which hates God like the Samaritan woman hated the “Jew” who was sitting by the well and asking her water; humanity which mocks God like that woman who spited Jesus asking him how he would give her water when he had no means for himself to drink; humanity which challenges God with inquisitives just as that Samaritan woman who began to question Jesus about the Jewish claims of truths! However, Jesus responds to that hardheartedness with such an embrace of compassion that she slowly gives into humility.

The Samaritan woman recognises and accepts her failures when she says – he said all that I ever did… that was an implicit acceptance of her weakness and fragility, an act of humility. It is of course not an act of self-belittling – that is never the intention of God with regard to us. When we were still sinful, God chose to send God’s son for our fullness sake! It is only in true humility, that is accepting the truth as it is, we open ourselves to encounter the insurmountable compassion of God.

The third dimension of the movement from lack to fullness is from hurt to hunger: There can be no person who has not had his or her own share of hurts in life. But as psychology reiterates more than emphatically, these hurts do not have the same effect on everyone invariably… there are different effects depending on how one has dealt with these experiences. Personal, social, historic hurts abound among us leaving us handicapped in really encountering the other… we are so filled with prejudices and precautions we fail to see, to listen or to understand. There needs to be a hunger, a thirst to know, to know the other, and to know the Other. That is what the Spirit calls us to. When Jesus speaks of worshipping God in Spirit and truth, he is speaking of this hunger and thirst for God that springs from within, pushing us to look for that fount of life-giving water.

Fasting has to prepare us and lead us towards this hunger, not leave us further hurt neither physically nor psychological or spiritually. Fasting has to be an instrument that leads us to look for God in our own lives, seek God within our inner selves, and encounter God as the “spring inside us welling up to eternal life”. Fasting has to become that experience of thirst, that feeling of hunger, that leads us from lack to fulness, from sinfulness to salvation, from looking for material satisfaction to yearning for eternal life.

 

 

 

 

Living for God is openness to new life!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – SATURDAY SECOND WEEK

March 07 – Micah 7: 14-15,18-20; Luke 15: 1-3, 11-32

Listening to God is living for God, and living for God is living as God wants, that is open to new life that God gives constantly. We know our weaknesses and our struggles. Our life is constantly stifled and thwarted by our limitations and our thoughtless choices. As the responsorial psalm reminds us today, if God were to treat us according to our merits, where would we be! But God does not treat us depending on our merits, but depending on God’s mercies; God is merciful and it is that mercy that renews our lives constantly.

Living for God is living with God, that is the guarantee of new life. To be led by the crook and the staff of the Divine Shepherd is the sign of being God’s own. By our choices many a time we choose to go away from God, abandon God’s ways and go on our own, but rarely realising that we are going away from life. It is the mercy of God that brings us back to Godself and makes us once again, God’s own.

Living for God is living as God wants. The will of God is not merely following laws and commandments… they matter because they help us to live in God, and it cannot be automatically vice versa – that is what Jesus time and again taught them, taught us – that living by rules cannot ensure that you are living in God, but living in mercy and love does. Living as God wants is living in love and mercy, in pardon and mutual acceptance, thus forming one family of brothers and sisters who accept each other along with out faults and failures.

Living for God is living like God, that is becoming like God, ever open to new life and offering it to everyone around. As Jesus says, we are called to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect – the perfection here referring to the mercy of God. Realising one’s own limitations and returning to God, forgiving the other’s limitations and accepting the other, owning God’s love and not slavishly squandering it when it is offered to us so gratuitously.

The call is therefore to live in love, acknowledging the renewing presence of God and beholding life, the new life that God constantly gifts us with, in and through so many ways – this is in short living for God; and that comes forth as an essential sign of listening to God.

 

 

 

Living for God to the extent of dying for God!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – FRIDAY SECOND WEEK

March 06 – Genesis 37: 3-4,12-13,17-28; Matthew 21: 33-43, 45-46

Listening to God is living for God; and living for God is living for the other… that is what we have been reflecting on these days inspired by the Word. Today the Word of God has a very drastic request to make – even if you are unable to live for the other, at the least can you rejoice in it when others get to live their lives well? We may wonder why this question, but if we honestly check our so-called “human” tendencies, this question will certainly make sense. When someone has a success, someone finds a fortune, when someone gets lucky, what is our immediate and spontaneous reaction? That would speak a lot about the tendency that we are referring to – that which we see in the readings today, the tendency of jealousy and the resultant treachery.

Letting the other live - Leave alone living for the other… can we rejoice in seeing the other live well? This is where the world has to begin today: letting others live. The brothers of Joseph in the first reading could not bear him live so well, so blessed and so loved, living a ‘dream-life’. They wanted to do away with him. This seems to be accepted today as “normal” today in the world…how cruel it is!

Letting go that the other might live – The second level is, beyond just letting the other live, letting go some of my hard-won rights or some of my treasured goodies, that the other might live off it. This letting go can be hard, but can become meaningful and profound when it defines me – it defined Joseph…he let go and remained blessed forever.

Giving oneself that others might live – This is a third level, not just letting go of something, but giving oneself, a self-giving that can make the other live. This is what Jesus preaches today in and through the parable that he narrates and the allusion that he has in it, to himself. As the Gospel acclamation reminds us, God so loved the world that God gave the only Son, that we may live! Jesus gave himself that we may live – that is Christ-ian living.

This is what we can learn from Jesus: living for God to the extent of dying for God… dying in our daily lives… letting others, letting go for others, and giving of ourselves for others.

Living for God is mindfulness of God!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – THURSDAY SECOND WEEK

March 05 - Jeremiah 17:5-10; Luke 16: 19-31

Listening to God is living for God – at times this “living for God” can become a cliché, meaning almost nothing, something that could remain merely a poetic way of saying nothing. But if we truly consider the sense of that call – to live for God – it would begin with living with God; living mindful of God who is with us!

Being mindful of God becomes a relevant call, especially in today’s context, where self-love and self-promotion are sanctimoniously safe guarded as an unquestionable right of individuals. Hence, what happens to the other or who happens to be around are immaterial and negligible as considerations. There can be three effects to such a lack of mindfulness of God – exaggerated and faulty grounds for life, justified insensitivity to the other, and incorrigible regrets that define life.   

There is nothing wrong in relying on the goodies that make our life easy, but an exaggerated reliance on them would make us sadly ignorant of the source of these so-called strengths of one’s being. Can we make them the ground of our meaning and security? The world does that and soon faces a disillusionment that cannot be blamed on anyone else other than oneself. That is the situation of being cursed, that the first reading refers to.

When we fail to be mindful of God who is the source of all that is good, we become so immersed in our haughtiness that we are blinded to anything other than ourselves. Alterity becomes a botheration, a nuisance, a needless burden, an unnecessary and insignificant thought that matters the least. Look at the way we define progress and peace today – is it not annihilating the other who is a nuisance and having our domineering way?

When this tendency is not recognised and addressed in time, we can grow so callously used to it that we would soon have regrets that can never be set right. The rich man in the parable did have his regrets about his way of life, but when it was too late and they could never be attended to. The world is racing its way towards this predicament; we would fall for its fallacies, if we do not get mindful of God on a daily basis – that is indeed the beginning of living for God.

Living for God and the pit-digging enemies!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – WEDNESDAY SECOND WEEK

March 04 - Jeremiah 18:18-20; Matthew 20: 17-28

Listening to God is living for God, and living for God is living for the other – we have been thinking in these lines the past days of the week. But there remain a lot many things that we need to clear our minds on, with this choice we decide to make. One of the fundamental questions is – what would be the effect of such a choice, namely the choice to live for God!

What could it be? A fulfilled life? Accolades and olive leaves that crown our heads? Thrones beside the king as John and James dreamt of having, or was it their mother? Successes, achievements, accomplishments and life-stories rewritten? All these are fairy tales considering the fact that the Word invites us to reflect on.

The fact is bitter – but a fact all the same. When I chose to live for God, I shall be surrounded by a swarm of enemies who are busy digging a pit for my ruin. We see that in Jeremiah’s experience… he cries out to God against the enemies who were concocting his destruction. Jesus announces his death, the cruel death he would be soon consigned to.

The Lord who calls us is not intending to deceive us, never does God deceive! God is letting us know exactly what we are running towards, in choosing God. But still it depends on us to choose to live for God, because we listen to God and we know exactly what can give true sense to our lives, what our lives can offer ourselves and those around us. Jeremiah knew it, and that is why he held on to that choice. Jesus knew it and that is why we are all saved – saved by that choice, by that choice of the Cross.

The world, the temptations, the attractions, the justifications, the compromises, the false promises, the apparent success stories, the shining limelight … all these vie with each other to take us away from listening to God and living for God. It is crucial for us to understand which of these are our enemies, the pit-digging enemies plotting our ruin.

Goodness and justice - signs of living for the other!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – TUESDAY SECOND WEEK

March 03 - Isaiah 1:10, 16-20; Matthew 23: 1-12

Listening to God is living for God, and living for God is living for the other - that is what the Word of God has been telling us these days as the week started… and today we have an explanation as to what it means to live for the other. We are presented with goodness and justice as the basic signs of living for the other.

Living for the other is all about goodness, that is, being good to the other, doing good to the other and giving the other the best that we can. It has to be necessarily preceded by justice which is fundamental to goodness, because it is giving what is due to the other, without any compromise on it. While the former is a noble gesture, the latter is a moral obligation.

Living for the other is a wonderful disposition, but it has to first start with the disposition of joy over the other who has the possibility of a good living. When the other has a success, when the other has a life that is eventful, when the other has an experience that is happy, I have to first be happy about it and not begrudgingly push it aside. Further, I cannot seek to destroy that possibility and rejoice over it. The latter is what we see happening much in the world today, filled with jealousy and malice, all justified by tendencies such as self-realisation and fulfilment.

We cannot be people who live for the other, merely by our words. We have to see this in our action. The thoughts of justice and acts of goodness have to become real… beginning with the closest to us – for the danger is when we speak of the “other” we might tend to think of someone far from us, removed from us. In fact, we are sometimes most cruel to those who are closer to us – out own people at home, the friends we take for granted and our colleagues whom we fail even to recognise sometimes.

Let us be persons who live goodness and justice in our daily life, everyday in our interactions and thus we will become people who live for the other… that is, people who live for God.

Living for God is living for the other!

Listening to God is living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 - MONDAY SECOND WEEK

March 02 - Daniel 9: 4-10; Luke 6: 36-38

Listening to God is living for God - that is what the Word of God emphatically established yesterday. We were called to let go, let God and live for God... living for God is the core of the message today. But living for God is not so easy, as the first reading tells us today: we have not listened to your servants, we have sinned, we have done wrong! But our faithfulness does not depend on our capacity, it depends on the Integrity of the Lord! 

We continue to walk with the Lord not because of our merit, but because of the integrity of the Lord. That is why we pray in the responsorial - Lord do not deal with us as our sins deserve, but according to your mercy, to your integrity. It is this that saves us from an eternal damnation, because God is merciful, loving and forgiving. That is the grace to which we appeal and that demands that we do the same to the other who appeals to us, for the amount we measure out will be the amount we will be given back. 

The key is, living for God is actually living for the other. The Other here is anyone who appeals to us - in their need, in their weaknesses, in their vulnerability, in their fallenness, in their inability, in their repeated failures. Are we ready to pardon them, accept them and embrace them? If so, we are disposing ourselves to the same pardon, acceptance and embrace of the Lord. When we opine that the other does not deserve our graciousness, we are deciding too that we have to be dealt with how we deserve to be, how our sins and our failures deserve to be death with. Is that not alarming?

The Word today has a simple but challenging call: do unto others what you want done unto to you! If you wish to live for God, begin with living for the other.

LISTENING TO GOD IS LIVING FOR GOD

Letting go...letting God... living for God

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 - SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT 

March 01 -  Genesis 12: 1-4; 2 Timothy 1: 8-10; Matthew 17: 1-9

Listening and Fasting - Lent as a time for conversion... that is our project. Listening to the right voice, was the project underlined last Sunday! Continuing that line of thought, the Word today explains what it means to listening to God, really. It means, living for God. 

There are two figures presented to us - one, in the person of Abraham who listened to the voice of God; and the other, in the persons of the apostles with Jesus on the mount, especially among them Peter. 

When Abraham listened to the voice calling him to leave his country and go where the Lord leads him... it was a great challenge of letting go of everything that mattered to him... just as Peter and apostles who are there on top of the mountain with Jesus. Letting go... is a call, and we are part of that call too, in the way we accept the call from God to believe and accept.

But this letting go does not guarantee everything... Abraham not only let go of everything, he also let God lead him. He did not ask God where God was leading him...he just followed. He humbly submits. This is where impetuous Peter resembles us... we think we are letting go of everything but at the same time we have so many plans and projects, like making three tents, achieving this, accomplishing that, establishing our names and make ourselves important. The voice immediately stops them and tells them: this is my Son,  Listen to him! May be we have to check our tendency here... and let God, let God lead, let God act, let God reign. 

Thirdly, letting God, is not passivity. It is actively living for God, making a choice for God which means at every moment trying to discern God's directions and making the right choice in the right way... that we may behold the glory of the Lord all the time with us, but shining out when we allow ourselves to be led by God. 

Living for God is the most authentic sign of listening to God.