As enter the period of transition from Christmas and Epiphany to Lent, it is time for us to reflect on how to prepare for this penitential season. It is a time of clearing out obstacles to God’s grace. When it comes to our penances, mortifications, and resolutions, they must always be done out of the love for God. All of these entail some degree of suffering, but we must remember the suffering of Our Savior for us while elevating these acts above the level of mere self-improvement and toward growing closer to God.

The Feast of the Purification, otherwise known as Candlemas, represents the end of the Christmas liturgical cycle. It is also a feast directed toward Our Lord and Simeon’s great longing for the day of His Incarnation. Simeon represents the expectation of the nations, awaiting the day when God would come to dispel darkness from the world.

When Our Lord heals both the leper and the Centurion’s servant. He awards both men for their faith, humility, and submission to His will. The account of these miracles of Christ are united in these men overcoming their discouragement and looking to Our Lord with both faith and a willingness to submit to God’s will. Every person has set backs. Every person gets discouraged. But ultimately, uniting our will with God’s, as trying as that can be at times, is the true path to sanctity. He will never abandon us. 

In the Gospels, we are met with the story of the leper who says a simple but profound prayer, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” He desires to be rid of his affliction, but ultimately he leaves it up to God’s will. In a distant time before this leper met Our Lord, we are taught in Scripture of Job, a man who lived righteously his whole life with much abundance, which was taken away. Despite numerous temptations, he remained faithful to God and, like the leper, practiced a holy indifference to worldly comfort out of a desire to conform his will to God’s.

The missionary spirt of the Catholic Church is driven by a sincere desire to deliver the truth for those poor souls who are without it. Sadly, the ideology of ecumenism has both deprived the Church of this spirit and promoted the idea about what is good in other religions. By the great grace we have been given as Catholics, it is incumbent upon us to spread the faith, to teach others who want to know, and by our acts, demonstrate how knowing God’s revelation has transformed our lives and can transform others as well.

Holy Mother Church assigns the liturgical calendar to reinforce crucial lessons for our lives. Of the seven sacraments, two are designated by God for the good of society: the priesthood and marriage. At the Wedding at Cana, God specifically elevated what was natural to the supernatural by blessing that union. God’s grace given through these sacraments are meant to give us the strength to fulfill their ends. In marriage specifically, we are are called upon to undertake the blessing that Our Lord gave us from the beginning, namely to be fruitful and multiply while also supporting our spouse with care and love.

As we enter the new year we are confronted with laws and policies that seek to suppress the Catholic Faith. In the face of these obstacles, do we have the faith, hope, and charity to meet these obstacles before us? We are confronted with a multitude of temptations that make us believe that we are the ultimate authority over our lives. Yet in these times of grave difficulties, we can turn to our Our Lady. Through the 54-Day Rosary Novena, there is an opportunity to fortify our faith and meet the temptations of the world. This beautiful devotion affirms our commitment to God and stands as a bulwark against the ways of the world.

The Holy Family stands as an example of what a family should be. The Church itself is a family as well. Yet today there is a revolution that seeks to undermine the proper order of both human families and the Church family by removing their hierarchical structure in favor of a bottom-up approach to authority. Added to this is the temptation to view the family not as a home, but as a hub where each individual member may pass through living their own life, but without a common commitment to the good of the whole. This problem is exacerbated on contemporary distractions like electronic devices which allow people to shut themselves off from one another. To combat this errant individualism, families must commit to sharing a common life, ranging from taking meals together to praying together as one.