3rd SUNDAY OF LENT

"Third, let us journey together in HOPE, for we have been given a promise. May the hope that does not disappoint (cf.Rom5:5), the central message of the Jubilee, be the focus of our Lenten journey towards the victory of Easter. As Pope Benedict XVI taught us in the Encyclical Spe Salvi, “the human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom8:38-39)”. Christ, my hope, has risen! He lives and reigns in glory. Death has been transformed into triumph, and the faith and great hope of Christians rests in this: the resurrection of Christ!

This, then, is the third call to conversion: a call to hope, to trust in God and his great promise of eternal life. Let us ask ourselves: Am I convinced that the Lord forgives my sins? Or do I act as if I can save myself? Do I long for salvation and call upon God’s help to attain it? Do I concretely experience the hope that enables me to interpret the events of history and inspires in me a commitment to justice and fraternity, to care for our common home and in such a way that no one feels excluded?”                (Cont. of message from Pope Francis  for Lent 2025 in the Jubilee year.)

The state of our world today, demands faith from us as well as HOPE. We have been listening to the Memoirs of Alexei Navalny (in another Blog) which reminds me of my stay in the Czech Republic, ten years after the velvet revolution. *

Our dear friend put me in an ex convent, now an inn, which, while clean and well stocked, never gave me a night's sleep.  At first I was puzzled why and then found out that it had been the political prison during the Communist regime. Each nun’s cell became a cell for political & social prisoners, including the future president, Vaclav Havel.  

Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. He served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. He was the first democratically elected president after the fall of communism. As a writer of Czech literature, he is known for his plays, essays and memoirs.

If anyone had the right to loose hope in humankind, he would be at the top of the list, and yet he never gave up:

“The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

( Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans and intro. by Paul Wilson) 

* The Velvet Revolution  was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia, occurring from 17 November 17 to 28, 1989. Popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party included students and older dissidents. The result was the end of 41 years of  one-party rule in the country, and the  conversion to a parliamentary republic