First Sunday of Lent: In Faith We Venture into Something New

Written on: February 14, 2013

Sr. Mary Kathleen Duggan, GNSH

The Mass readings for the first Sunday of Lent give us Moses’ last words to the pilgrims he has led for forty years, out of their slavery in Egypt to the country that was to be their new home, a land “flowing with milk and honey.” He does not tell the people that this is his last speech to them, that they themselves must learn how to change from wandering nomads to farmers, builders of cities, merchants, soldiers. He only reminds them that it was God who brought them out from the Egyptian bondage to their own new country.

As we Grey Nuns stand on the brink of our own venture into “something new,” aware that in a rapidly changing world we must prayerfully consider adjustment, this opening of Lent becomes for us a time of forty days to renew our deep trust, in the same faith that has always been ours, in the fact that a time of testing and anxiety is a necessary approach to an ever-deepening awareness of the closeness to us of our loving God, he who despite the times “is the same Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and forever.”

This is a time to make our personal commitment with the Church to a year of Faith, a time in which we “grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ” and, in days of unparalled change, are reminded that “Because she clings to me, I will deliver her; I will set her on high because she acknowledges my name.”

Sister Mary Kathleen lives in Buffalo, NY.  She has been a teacher, an administrator and most recently an archivist for D’Youville College.  Her passion is writing and reading!  She is enjoying her retirement.

This entry was posted in From our Sisters and tagged: GNSH, Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, Lent, Religion, Sisters, Spirituality, Sunday Mass Readings, women religious