PEACE-LENT 2023: Peace is Compassion!

Friday after Ash Wednesday - February 24, 2023

The WORD in LENT: Isaiah 58: 1-9; Matthew 9: 14-15

Satyagraha! Peace marches! Marathon for peace! Fasting for peace! How do these really function? Have you ever given a thought to it? What does it matter if you and I fast or go for a march or take up some campaign for world peace? How does it work, that one in one end of the world is fasting or going on a march for peace in another end of the world? Does it work at all?

Fasting during the lent - how does it affect the Community of faith? Is it only the money that is saved that matters, that we can give it to someone in need? What does it really do to me and to the rest around me, when I fast? And why should we fast at all? These are some questions that arise, everytime we celebrate this all important season of lent. 

Fasting is a sign of compassion. It is a sign of utmost participation in the sufferings of others - be those sufferings caused by external reasons or internal. Fasting for the sake of itself, may help oneself in self-control and self-discipline, but that is not the principal motive of fasting! This is what Jesus brings out in his critical presentation of fasting, not to say about the prophetic voice of Isaiah.

Fasting will have done its real contribution to humanity - to persons and the community at large - only when it inspires compassion in the heart of persons. This compassion is feeling for the needy other, the suffering other, the weeping other, the languishing other... it is this compassion that will render our fast a real Christian act. This compassion alone can lead to peace - in our hearts, in our society, in the whole of humanity. 

There can be no peace until I begin to think of and to worry about the other and their needs: because peace is fundamentally, compassion!

PEACE-LENT 2023: Peace is a Choice!

Thursday after Ash Wednesday - February 23, 2023

The WORD in LENT: Deuteronomy 30: 15-20; Luke 9: 22-25

Very often we complain and lament on things that go wrong in our lives, blaming it on someone or something! Without uncompassionately brushing aside the pain that is involved in the experience of trouble or loss or difficulty, if we seek to find the real cause, the root cause, the ultimate cause... we shall find there, a choice! 

When situations of conflicts arise, when persons around create a crisis or events of life rake up problems... what matters is not actually what happens, but what we choose! We make choices that, may not be immediately, but eventually take us to where we find ourselves at the end. If everything is a choice, just so or more so, peace is a choice!

If I wish peace in my mind, in my heart and in my life - I have to choose it. If I choose ego, if I choose success, if I choose prosperity, if I choose profit or my own material growth, I choose them! Yes, I choose them, and not peace! Choosing peace sometimes, or most of the times in fact, costs! I have to be ready to pay the cost. That is what Jesus means by "taking up my cross" - it is choosing to pay the cost, for the divine peace that we can find only in the Lord and in the salvation that the Lord has planned for us. 

We may think we are choosing life, or  that we are choosing prosperity... but in actuality we might be choosing death and disaster! We need to pay attention. What matters is not immediate gratification but the ultimate good. At times it might require sacrifices and mortifications. If we need peace, we need to choose it, because peace is a choice!