“Cadbury’s Cream Eggs are in the shops….. in fact they have been there for a few weeks now, but it is only with the coming of Ash Wednesday that I have really noticed them. They sit on the shelf in the shop, gently ‘smiling’ at you as you pass by; do they remind you of Easter, probably not, more likely the taste and texture of the sweet filling as you chew and swallow. They are an example of something that has become divorced from its real meaning – a pleasant, and to some a very sickly, taste rather than anything to do with our own spiritual new birth through the death and resurrection of Christ!
Sometimes we just forget what things are really about and the exceptional becomes the everyday. That is a shame, since it involves a ‘deadening’ of our senses which is self-inflicted, ‘though often in a very slow and subtle way.
I mentioned at Mass on Ash Wednesday that I had been set thinking by a comment I had heard on the radio a few days before where someone had said that the opposite of love is not hatred but, rather, fear. I am sure they are right. So many things we attribute to hatred are actually the result of people’s fear. When we stop and really think, we can see it in ourselves, especially when we hit out at others for no apparent reason: it just seems to explode in us – the gossip, the anonymous letter writer, the slanderer. Who would have ever thought we could do such things ? But, we do…. And we need to face up to it and set about ‘coming home’ to whom we really are, not what our bad actions seem to show us to be, for that is what Lent can be about – rediscovering that the real us is not the person who does those things; on the contrary, they are the sins that disturb us in our inner self, and thus, they are the things that we need to ask God to free us from in such times as Lent.
So, be of food heart and ask the Lord to send His grace to purify us, once again, to be able to see the true glories of Easter. ”
