Lent is greeted by many as a time to curb the unnecessary busyness preventing them from experiencing a spiritual encounter with Jesus Christ.

Ash Wednesday is on the horizon. While Catholics are getting ashes on our foreheads, much of the rest of the Western world will be buying chocolates and flowers. I don’t remember Ash Wednesday falling on Valentine’s Day previously. Google says the last time was in 1945, a little before my time.

In this final stretch before Easter, let’s return to where we began — looking at the entirety of Christ’s way of being, as an integral whole of truth, goodness and beauty. Any other way risks removing something essential. 

With St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Lenten Friday this year, many U.S. bishops have issued dispensations from abstinence on March 17, allowing the faithful to enjoy the American Irish tradition of eating corned beef (or ham) and cabbage in good conscience.

Every so often a song comes into my life that makes me cry in a flood of deep spiritual emotion. The latest one made my wife cry first. She heard it at a performance where our kid is a Grade 12 student at the Etobicoke School of the Arts. It was a choral rendition of Low Lily’s song “Hope Lingers On,” arranged by Andrea Ramsey. She inspired an online search for it. This article is best read to that soundtrack.

We humans need to be tended. Sheep are tended by a shepherd. Gardens are tended by a gardener. Even databases are tended by experts.

As we progress along any journey, we are faced with countless distractions, our own laziness or lukewarmness, and temptations that can lead us astray.

When Christ calls Himself the Way, the Truth and the Life, it raises the question: What does it mean to follow that Way, share that Truth, live that Life?

For all Catholics, the Lenten season holds a particular significance. For schoolchildren, the season was perhaps marked by pancakes in the school gym on Shrove Tuesday and worksheets on what kind of candy we wouldn’t eat for the next month and a half.

It can be a cruel, cruel world. The stories from Ukraine, at times either heart-breaking or heart-lifting, are testament to that.

When I first met Jesus at age 15, I was gung-ho for penances, self-sacrifice, offering up little sufferings, practicing mortifications, etc. In fact, I had picked up somewhere along the line that agony was the essence of Christianity and sanctity.

It may seem to us that just a few weeks ago we were celebrating the Christmas season — the season of joy. Yet, in the midst of an unusually cold winter and with snow still on our parishes’ parking lots, our journey of faith brings us to the season of Lent — a season of reflection.

In February I decided to read Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It was written 702 years ago and remains an exhausting, thrilling ride of the imagination. In essence, it’s one long poem that reads like an adventure novel, though few novelists have ever written a story so rich and holy.

Lent is a time for reflection and renewal.

VATICAN CITY -- People should fast from gossiping and spreading hearsay as part of their Lenten journey, Pope Francis said.