Monday, March 14, 2016

It Finally Starts!

If you’re like me, you were looking forward to the beginning of Great Lent as an opportunity to regain some control in your life both physically and spiritually. With all life’s obligations and spiritual road bumps, it is comforting (to me at least) that today is Clean Monday, a day of strict fasting and prayer as the first day of Great Lent. It isn’t as if I can’t do these things other days, but I need all the help I can get so I am thankful for this season.

God has guided His Church into all truth through the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. More and more I realize just much the Holy Spirit has helped humanity over the centuries. Doctors ‘now’ tell new mothers they should stay low with their newborns for six weeks (about 40 days). Doctors ‘now’ tell us that an occasional cleansing diet (strict fast) is good for our bodies. These are just two examples of how the Holy Spirit guided the Church to establish practices that also happened to be good for our bodies.

It shouldn’t surprise us since our bodies and our souls are intimately connected. We are neither ‘just’ a body, nor ‘just’ a soul within a ‘shell’ we call the body. The body participates in our entire spiritual journey, from the moment we are baptized into Christ until the moment we are buried. Without our bodies we would have no way to repent from the sins that our bodies helped to act out in the first place.


So consider the next seven weeks as an intense trip to the gym, a body/soul gym, and allow the life of the Church to improve your physical health AND help your soul grow closer to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Have a blessed Great Lent!

To help you along the way, I suggest a daily visit to Lent.GoArch.org

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