Sunday April 6th, 2025 – 5th Sunday of Lent
“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will, all I have and call my own.
You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it.
Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.”
(St. Ignatius of Loyola)
Dear Friends,
In a consumption-based culture, the value of surrendering oneself to something greater is seen as a sign of failure and weakness. Only acquisition is seen as victory, “The one who dies with the most stuff is the winner….” Or something along those lines.
As we prepare to remember the greatest surrender, when the Word made flesh, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, dies a rather violent and senseless death on a tree whose fruit seems to contain no satisfaction but misery, pain, and the ultimate void of death.
We are being asked to believe that ultimate surrender is ultimate victory.
And yet right at the moment of his surrender, Christ gives us the key to the door that surrender opens. It is the door of absolute dependence and the freedom that we don’t have to be in control all the time, the freedom to let someone else do the work. After the heavy work of the carrying the cross, Christ finally can say it is finished, into greater hand she commends his spirit and he can finally totally and irrevocably be free.
It is that freedom finally that the heavy weight of human living and burdensome, calculated choice become overwhelmingly light because we can finally let go. Our work of carrying any cross is over, and the one whose Name is Love takes over! And that sweet freedom, that amazing grace will finally take us home!
As Lent moves toward Holy Week, let’s continue to hold each other close in prayer and good works!
