Lenten reflection - what's in a gaze?

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Lenten reflection - what's in a gaze?

Have you ever met or talked with someone and the way they look at you is profoundly different?  I remember my very first day with my wife, Joanne.  We went to dinner and the movies and had really nice time with conversation was easy.  Afterward, I drove her home, and we stood outside of her apartment in a two-family house on a quiet street in Watertown, Massachusetts.  It was one of those beautiful late summer evenings but what I remember most was that look in Joanne’s eyes when we kissed under a moonlit sky.  It was a gaze that stopped my world and told me that she was nowhere but in that moment with me.  I was thinking that it was far too early to be a look of love but it was a gaze that looked deeper than just into my eyes only and gave me a feeling I will never forget, as it sits front and center in my memory file and my heart.  When I recall that moment with Joanne, I call it “the look”, but it was much more than that to me.

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Lenten reflection - the image is the clue

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Lenten reflection - the image is the clue

Lent provides a great opportunity to spend more time being with God, and in turn recognizing who we are and what God asks of us.  In Matthew 22:15-22, the Pharisees are trying to entrap Jesus again, this time with a question on taxes. “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” Jesus is well aware of the tax revolt going on at the time and if he answered "yes," he would lose favor with the Jews due to the burdensome taxes, and if he responded "no," he may be charged with sedition by the Romans. Jesus was too smart for that and much too wise to pass up an opportunity to teach something profound.  Instead of taking sides and responding to the trap, Jesus asks for a coin, and the readiness to provide one proved the Pharisees use and acceptance of Roman administration.  He asked whose image was on the coin and when they respond, “The emperor’s,” he tells them to “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and to God the things that are God’s.”  So Jesus has shrewdly raised the stakes of the discussion and turned the tables on the Pharisee's plans to trap him. How so?

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Lenten reflection -How envy hurts us

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Lenten reflection -How envy hurts us

Each Lent gives us a great opportunity to stop our busy lives to grow spiritually in some way.  Besides giving something up and doing good works, it is a great time to reflect on the Word and where we can recognize things in ourselves that separate us from God’s plan.  Most of us probably don’t think we are guilty of the seven deadly sins (Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) but, when we look deeper, there is often a hint of all of them in each of us, more than we like to admit.  The seven deadly sins are deadly, not in themselves but in what they can lead us to.  Envy is an example of one we may have experienced at times in our lives that can greatly impact us and those around us.  There is nothing wrong with desiring good things in life or even what other people enjoy, but envy is a “sadness or discontent at the excellence, good fortune, talent, blessings, or success of another person. It implies that one considers oneself somehow deprived by what one envies in another.”  It isn’t an ordered desire for the good but being fixated on drawing comparisons between ourselves and others, or the destructive sense of rivalry that drives the sin of envy – someone is better off than us and it makes us angry. 

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