In the Gospel author’s account of the first Christian Pentecost, we should see - 50 days after the new and definitive Passover - that the Apostles’ being filled with the Spirit and bringing people to trust and follow Jesus is like the bundle of wheat offered to God as a sign of the abundant harvest to come.

In this period before Pentecost, it's ours to join the disciples in nine days (minus a couple if we start on Sunday) of prayer, observing the Church’s first novena.

Motherly love is self-effacing. No, it is self-sacrificial. This for-the-other love of true mothers, biological or not, brings to life the love of God in a way we so desperately need today.

So what is the way, the truth, and the life if not love all the way through? There's simply no room for arrogance in our hearts and lives when we hold fast to Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life.

God only knows us by name!

By raising Jesus from the dead, God has marked him out as his people's Messiah and the Lord of all Nations.

Here we see the power of trusting in Jesus: in him we receive the mercy of God, and in him we are made vessels of his mercy (his bountiful and forgiving love!) to everyone we encounter.

My friends, the risen Jesus is the first part of God’s re-created world, set free from the disfiguring forces of sin and death. We enter this new world, we live into this new world, by LOVE.

As we wrap up this period of preparation for Jesus’ resurrection, there’s a lot to look forward to in our celebration of the Church’s holiest days. The Triduum services this week – Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil – are really one extended liturgy.

All of this we forgo in order to enter into a veiled time; an unmediated, unseeing abandonment to God, who himself descends into our darkness.

Remember that this season is all about love. Lent needs to make us more loving. We can break it down and say that prayer is about loving God more, fasting is about living a disciplined self-love, and almsgiving make us more attuned to the needs of our neighbor.

I’ve noticed, further, that Lent (spurred on, I believe, by fasting) dredges up - and makes more apparent - our sinfulness. If you’re there, then I’m in good company: My own venturing out into the desert with Jesus has yet again helped me to see that I am self-referential, self-indulgent, and selfish.

There, at the turning point of Jesus’ mission, we hear these powerful words: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”

Whatever you do, do it for God. Don’t do it because you’re tough and can handle more; don’t do it to be bolder than someone else; don’t do it so you can tell others about it; and don’t do it because it benefits you in some other way. Do it, whatever it is, because you love and trust God. The reward will be beyond your imagining.

The goal of a good Lent is to center our hearts on God (who is love) and to become like him by giving ourselves generously away.

Precisely because he is God-as-man, Jesus reveals to us what God intended by his Law, and what it means to live it out.

I’m often asked by parishioners to recommend books for spiritual reading. It’s sometimes tricky to nail down what someone means by spiritual reading, so I offer a number of suggestions in what I consider different categories of that genre.

I'm desperate to figure out how God wants to love the world through us in every practical detail.

Our days can pass by in a blur, but our lives need not be unexamined. This is the genius of the nightly examen prayer, which is an important practice for a serious plan of life.

You will know that you have truly prayed when you grow in peace, and when you find eagerness to get back to your day.