My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

The forty days of Lent have been described by one spiritual writer as God’s gift to us by which Christ reaches out to embrace us and to pull us along on our journey to the Kingdom of God. The Lenten Season is a spiritual springtime in which God invites us to be faithful to the Gospel and to grow in His love.

Lent enlivens our faith and it enriches our fidelity to the Lord. It strengthens our commitment to live as His disciples by our personal witness to His peace, justice and love. The Lenten season reawakens in us our responsibility “to act justly, to love tenderly, to walk humbly with God” (Micah 6:8) and to serve as did Jesus. In short, during these forty days of Lent, prayer, penitential practices and outreach to the needy bolster our resolve to live in communion with Christ by living in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in God's family.

Ashes mark the beginning of our journey to Easter where we renew the life of grace that we received at Baptism. Placed on our foreheads in the sign of the Cross, the ashes are a sign of our willingness to follow Christ and of our readiness to embrace His Cross, the sign of our redemption and new life. They indicate our desire “to leave the past in ashes.”

In Jesus' company, we begin our journey to Calvary and to a new springtime in our spiritual lives. We take up the Cross and leave behind our past with all its traces of self-centeredness, selfishness and indifference to others’ needs.

In taking up the Cross, we embrace sacrificial love that endures and triumphs and gives life. It is a love that is forgiving and merciful and it puts others’ needs above our own. It expresses itself in gentle and caring service to others. By allowing the power of Christ’s death on the Cross to work in us, we shall rise with Him in a victory over sin and death. When we embrace the Cross, evil and wickedness can no longer imprison us in their darkness. The death of Jesus on the Cross is our liberation from sin and from our past. It empowers us to live in Jesus and to experience the fulfillment and peace that only His genuine, selfless love can give.

In his Lenten Pastoral for 2010, Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, reflects on the justice of God by which expiation for sin “flows from the ‘Blood’ of Christ” as “the loving act of God who opens Himself in the extreme, even to the point of bearing in Himself the ‘curse’ due to man so as to give in return the blessing due to God (CF Galatians 3:13-14).” The Holy Father points out the exorbitant price that God paid for our redemption and he speaks of “diving justice so profoundly different from its human counterpart.” Divine justice is discovered in the death of Jesus on the Cross “where the just man dies for the guilty and the guilty receives in return the blessing due to the just one.” The Cross teaches us our need for God and His merciful love. The Holy Father writes, “Before the justice of the Cross, man may rebel for this reveals how man is not a self-sufficient being, but in need of Another in order to realize himself fully. Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need -- the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship.”

In preparing us for Easter, Lent fortifies us so that we can embrace God's justice and share in a new way of living in Jesus Christ. Our Lenten practices strengthen our will to reject sin not only now but in every time and season of our lives. By our Lenten sacrifices and acts of self-denial, the mind and heart of Jesus, Who emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, accepting death on a Cross, will begin to take shape in us. (CF Philippians 2:3-8)

A well-lived Lent renews our love for Christ and our appreciation for His Passion, Death and Resurrection. It deepens our hunger for Jesus in the Eucharist and it intensified our need to participate at Mass each week. As we reflect on Jesus’ Way of the Cross, we see ever more clearly our need for the forgiving grace of the Sacrament of Penance.

Yes, Christ is reaching out to embrace us and to pull us along on our Lenten journey to Easter and to living anew the life of His love and the justice of His Cross -- both gifts that our gracious, generous God shares with us through the triumph of Jesus’ Resurrection.

May Lent be a time of grace to live more fully our fidelity to the Gospel and our witness to Jesus Christ, the Lord!

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Michael R. Cote

Bishop of Norwich