Lenten Season Message

Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

My dear parishioners and friends of OLAP, Easter draws near. Forty days from now (which constitute Lent), and Three Days thereafter (the Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), we shall celebrate the greatest of all our Christian Feasts—the Feast of the Resurrection of the Lord.

From ancient times this Feast has occupied central place in the Church’s liturgical life, simply because the Resurrection of the Lord is the very foundation of her Christian faith. As St. Paul would say, without the resurrection of the Lord our faith is in vain and our hope without basis. The Resurrection of the Lord is so central to our faith-life that we in fact celebrate it every Sunday, thus, calling Sunday, the Day of the Lord (Dies Domini). Every Sunday, indeed, points to Easter Sunday, the Day the Lord rose from the dead; Easter Sunday, on the other hand, makes every Sunday of every week meaningful and significant, for we Christians who work and toil the whole week through are recreated and renewed every Sunday as we gather and make holy this Day of the Lord, remembering and celebrating His Death and Resurrection.

Although every Sunday is a commemoration of Easter Sunday, in itself the Easter Sunday of every year commemorates in the most special way the first Easter Sunday when precisely Jesus, after his passion, death and burial, rose from the dead, triumphant over sin and death, victorious as Sovereign Lord. This Great Feast, or Solemnity as we properly call it, is worth all our time, energy, and resources to prepare well and so celebrate with great joy and love. That is why we have been given enough time—Forty Days—of prayer, penance, and almsgiving. This preparatory period of 40 Days is called Lent. It is time devoted to intense and deep spiritual exercises, all with a view towards achieving true conversion and transformation of the self, from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. In this process of conversion and transformation Christ is central and pursuit and following of His Son Jesus as Master and Lord.

With Lent, marked by personal perseverance and conscious and active participation in the various activities proposed by the Church, we come to celebrate Easter with a greater sense of meaning and appreciation for Christ’s Cross and Resurrection, for Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, for the very mystery that is life itself, for the life in the spirit of Christ itself that is His gift to us and our special call.

Truly, we are blessed to celebrate Easter with a parish fiesta tuck within. Our Fiesta becomes doubly meaningful and joyous as it calls us to be a Community of the Lord’s Disciples dedicated to Mary, His Mother, who in her own life has made doing God’s will definitive of her life-choices. I, therefore, suggest that we make the 40 days of Lent a preparation for Easter as well as for our 16th Parish Fiesta Celebration.

In addition, let us make the whole of Lent and Easter a time of real, concerted, and parish-wide formation during which we can learn more about Christ and the Christian life. For this purpose, what better document we have at hand than that of the Holy Father’s recent encyclical, entitled, Spe Salvi. Here the Holy Father invites and challenges us to reflect on the virtues of faith and hope, the very message of Easter and the basis of Christian life. With Spe Salvi may we be reminded also of the truth that the Holy Father likewise wrote about a year ago, namely, that God is love—Deus Caritas est—and that we are called to mirror this same love.

A Happy Easter, to all of you. But first, let me wish you a grace-filled Lent and a very Holy Week, and then, of course, thereafter, a truly Happy Fiesta.

Yours ever,

Msgr. Romy Rañada