Pope Francis recalled that Lent is a special time of conversion to “reconcile ourselves with God”, and encouraged to live these days with prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
This was indicated by the Holy Father in his homily for the Mass on Ash Wednesday, in which he presided at the Basilica Santa Sabina in Rome.
The Eucharist, in which the Pontiff presided over the rite of imposition of the ashes, which he in turn received from the hands of Cardinal Mauro Piacenza, was preceded by a penitential procession.
The procession began in the church of San Anselmo all’Aventino, and was attended by Cardinals, bishops, the monks of this church and the Dominicans of Santa Sabina.
In his homily, Pope Francis stressed that “the rite of ashes introduces us to this path of return, it invites us to return to what we really are and to return to God and to our brothers and sisters.”
“The ash reminds us who we are and where we come from, it brings us back to the fundamental truth of life: only the Lord is God and we are the work of his hands,” the Pope stressed.
“We have life while He is life. He is the Creator, while we are fragile clay that is molded in his hands. We come from earth and we need Heaven, Him. With God we will rise from our ashes, but without Him we are dust”, assured the Holy Father.
Lent, Pope Francis continued, “is the favorable time to convert, to change our gaze, first of all, of ourselves, to see ourselves from within.”
“How many distractions and superficialities keep us from what is important. How many times do we focus on our desires or on what we lack, moving away from the center of the heart, forgetting to embrace the meaning of our being in the world, ”she warned.
The Pope also stressed that “Lent is certainly the favorable time to return to essentials, to strip ourselves of what weighs us down, to reconcile ourselves with God, to rekindle the fire of the Holy Spirit that dwells hidden among the ashes of our fragile humanity.”
Lent, he continued, “is a real time to take off the masks we wear every day, pretending to be perfect in the eyes of the world; to fight, as Jesus told us in the Gospel, against falsehood and hypocrisy. Not those of others, but ours.”
“The ash that we receive on our heads today tells us that every presumption of self-sufficiency is false and that idolizing the self is destructive and locks us in the cage of solitude,” Pope Francis remarked.