QUESTION:
Sometimes Lent comes and goes and I feel unchanged. How can I make this Lent a more meaningful experience?
One of the most fruitful practices of Lent can be meditating on the passion and death of Jesus. Usually, we do that by praying the Stations of the Cross.
I think most of the time when people participate in that, they focus on how Jesus suffered. But maybe it’s more beneficial to us if we focus on the way in which Jesus accepted His suffering, the way in which He went through the various stages of His passion, crucifixion, and death.
For example: Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane and He is realizing His mortality as a human being. He knows His life is coming to an end and it is said that He was so overcome by the suffering, the rejections, the false accusations, and all the things that happened to Him up until that point in time, that He literally sweat blood. At one point, He showed His human-ness in a most direct way when He said, “Father, if it is possible, take this cup away from Me.” And yet, the next words out of His mouth were, “Not My will, but Your will be done.”
I think if we really focus on those different scenes, the vignettes that happened and that we typically pray in the Stations of the Cross, we can learn from every single one of them something that we can apply to our lives, that we can use in our own suffering. And, just as importantly, that we can demonstrate to those around us.