Rev. José Eugenio Hoyos
This weekend most of the faithful in the Christian world we begin preparing ourselves of a different, deep and effective form to celebrate the Time of Lent.
Lent: forty days of approach to God and of opportunities to enrich our spiritual life. The times through that we are living today are not the best, we nor are living through the end of the world either, have recognized and experienced a crisis serious economy. A recession that for the poorest is not new because they have always lived in recession precarious and lacking in the basic familiar basket.
Before this financial crisis that has destabilized the global economy, this time of Christian reflection turns into the proper propitious space of which the material thing is not the most important thing but we must turn God. Today more that never, the mitigation of our problems, needs and worries is that in this time we contemplate massacred, kidnapped, ignored and deported Jesus, with our attitude of receiving it with the open arms and allow him in this epoch to enter our hearts. Let's contemplate Christ in the face of every immigrant, of the unemployed man, of the imprisoned one, of the hungry one and of the pushed back one, there Jesus is in them living. Our Church invites us to the spiritual growth and to the meeting of us ourselves to find Christ; but to obtain it we must have a discipline, an order in our lives and several of these practices there are the fasting and the abstinence.
|
|
The fasting consists of doing only one strong meal a day, the abstinence consists of without eating meat. There are days of abstinence and fasting from Wednesday of Ash. In the Time of Lent that began Wednesday of Ash until the Holy Friday; every Friday one does not eat meat.
The abstinence forces from fourteen years and the fasting of the eighteen up to fifty nine years of age. The fasting and the abstinence are not dedicated to lose weight or to offer it like spiritual diet: it is everything opposite. Today, in these moments, the challenge of the Catholics is to proscribe the misery with works of social justice.
Abstaining from eating meat is not to give us a banquet every Friday of lobsters and seafood. I hope let's write and let's design a well big sign in our kitchen that he says: "every Friday one does not eat meat, the meat is very expensive” and with all reason to create conscience in the family of which it is a time of abstinence, fasting, benefactions and many prayer.
I cheer up!, let's try to continue the orders of the Church and we will see a big spiritual growth.
|
