The Lord called me from birth,
from my mother’s womb he gave me my name. (Isa 49:1)
The words of Isaiah describing the Suffering Servant also refer to us. The Lord has called us from birth – he knew us before we were even conceived – and named us while we still were in the womb. The name he’s given us is a name known only to him, a name we’re meant to discover throughout our entire lives, a name that will be spoken to us by God himself when we reach heaven. He gave us our name.
Lent is about discovering another letter of that name so that we can move closer and closer to the person God wants us to be, the person he’s envisioned from all Eternity. We dig and dig, trying to root out of our hearts all that is base and ugly and to find within ourselves the goodness God implanted there when he created us.
It’s Holy Week – the last lap of the race, so to speak. The tendency could be to relax, to pride ourselves in how well we’ve done for the past five weeks, to kind of coast along to the finish line. We’ve worked hard all Lent, we’ve done enough, right? Not. Now is the time to put the pressure on to the max, to work our hardest to finish that which has been left undone. Now more than ever is time for prayerfulness, solitude, penance, and silence so that we can hear clearly the next letter of our name.
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