Add forgiveness to your Lenten discipline

With the month of February which, often enough, is the month when the great penitential season of Lent begins, the Church offers us this time when we can refocus our lives and our faith on the person of Jesus Christ. Of course, every day of our Church year offers us this opportunity, but Lent offers us a special time of grace to remove the obstacles we have created between us and the Lord.
 
We are certainly familiar with what the Church calls the discipline of Lent. Those traditional and very fruitful practices of intense prayer, acts of self-mortification and sincere works of charity, especially the practice of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, are part of Lent’s discipline. The Church urges us to practice these acts faithfully every day of Lent.
 
However, I would like to suggest another practice which is certainly related to the ones I just mentioned. It comes from a regular examination of conscience and should be the fruit of our prayer and certainly it is an act of charity. I am speaking of the need to forgive any other person who may have offended us or whom we have offended by asking for forgiveness. In one way, this is probably the most difficult thing to do. It is not an easy thing nor is it the first thing we usually consider. Often enough, we do just the opposite by responding in kind or maligning another or we simply carry a grudge which becomes the greatest obstacle between us and the other and certainly between us and God. We simply cannot love God if we do not forgive or seek forgiveness from another. Saint Paul addresses this matter in more than one of his epistles when he exhorts the Christians “to forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.” 
 
So, with the celebration of Ash Wednesday when those ashes are placed on our foreheads in the Sign of the Cross, let us realize that the Cross is the sign of how the “Lord has forgiven us.”