Our Season of Lent During A Pandemic

Today is Ash Wednesday marking the beginning of our Season of Lent for the year 2021. Once again we have reached another Lenten Season whilst still in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like all the previous years, the last Lent Season (2020) for our Society started normally, we had our normal Ash Wednesday mass marked by quite a sizeable attendance as compared to the rest of the weekday Masses. Though it not being a holy day of obligation, even some of us who normally couldn’t pitch up for the weekday masses always made an extra effort to ensure we made it for the Mass.

The Mass was marked by a long line of us students headed towards our Chaplain to have the sign of the cross marked on our foreheads using ash. But the normalcy of our Lent Season was soon brought to a halt as the pandemic found its way to our shores. Soon after that, we found literally almost everything closing down including our schools and our Churches.

We sincerely hoped that this new normal wasn’t going to stay for too long and that soon we would be back to our regular activities, but once again we find ourselves having to soldier on amidst the crisis. This year we start Our Lent season in a way which we are not accustomed to; there will be no Priest marking the sign of the cross on our foreheads like we are accustomed to. Even though several initiatives are being made, the new normal will always be hard to adjust to for several people.

For most of us, the sign of the cross on Ash Wednesday was something that we would wear with pride as we felt it was a firm profession of our Faith. I remember a friend of mine who was a non-Catholic would always know that the season of Lent had begun just by seeing the ashes on our foreheads.

But during this time of the pandemic, our focus again is drawn towards Mat 6:5-8. Just because our peers don’t see the sign of the cross on our foreheads doesn’t mean we are not professing our faith. But rather during this hard period we should be cautious enough to try and not to pass the contagious virus.

Covid-19 has filled our community with a lot of fear, anxiety as well as sadness. We have lost people dearest to us, some of us have been infected and there has been considerable loss of income within families. It is at this particular point in time when we enter into the season of Lent with the theme, “Lent, A Time for Renewing Faith, Hope and Love.” These three theological virtues mean a lot to our lives, and we also need to see how renewing these can help see us through this hard phase.

So many times during this pandemic we have seen ourselves as well as those around us losing Faith. We have lost faith in the medical sector within our country as well as in the efforts of the government in mitigating the effects of the virus. We have to some extent also at times lost faith in our prayers, as we ask ourselves why the help we are longing for is taking too long to come. But we cannot lose our faith in God. The Holy Father says, “Lent is a time for believing, for welcoming God into our lives and allowing Him to make His dwelling among us.” How important it is that we recognize that God is with us, even during these difficult times that we are facing.

Hope is what sustains us. As Pope Francis says, “In these times of trouble when everything seems fragile and uncertain it may appear challenging to speak of hope. Yet, Lent is precisely the season of hope when we turn back to God, who patiently continues to care for His creation which we have often misused.” Many times, Lent is described as the “springtime of the soul” as God’s creation gives us the four seasons. As we move out of winter, a time of some dreariness, we come to springtime, which restores our hope. We see the plants coming out of the ground and growing, the trees beginning to bud, and a promise of their leaves returning.

These are signs of hope, and so it is for us at Lent. It is a time when we renew our hope to make sure that we never lose our faith, which is the foundation of our hope. The Holy Father goes on to talk about love. He tells us that “Love is following in the footsteps of Christ in concern and compassion for all and the highest expression of our faith and hope.” Lent certainly gives us an opportunity to express our love for others, as well as our love for God. As we look for opportunities to assist others during Lent, we find that these opportunities are not lacking within our Society.

The arrival of the pandemic has resulted in uncountable job losses as well as reductions in terms of income. This has left many households vulnerable and unable to fully fend for their daily needs. Last year at the dawn of the Lent Season we started the Samaritan Basket Initiative as a Society with the thrust being to share whatever the little we had so that none of us ever went hungry. It is at such a moment that the concept of being your brother’s keeper becomes more important. But we don’t have to just look at the material needs but we also need to check on one another as the current situation also tends to have a mental toll.