Lent: A Time to be Distracted no Longer!

The Christian philosopher Blaise Paschal had written: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quiet in his room.” So what did Pascal really mean when he said that we cause our own misery by our inability to sit still, certainly bad news for those of us who are extroverts? He was saying that throughout our lives, and without our being aware of it, we can spend so much time and energy allowing ourselves to be distracted from what is most important in life. And these distractions become the very tools of temptation used by the evil one to distract us off the path that leads to God, a path that requires silence, solitude, and reflection. 

In today’s Gospel, the devil works to use these tools of distraction in an attempt to divert Jesus from the task that God has set before Him. The One not fallen but divine, allowed Himself to be led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the evil one. Yet all the time Jesus faced these temptations, He did not let himself to become distracted from His mission as the Savior of the world and the living presence of God’s love. In fact, this time in the desert and these temptations were moments of grace for Jesus, further solidifying all that He knew that He was and what He had to do.  

Friends, as our Lent begins, might I suggest that we allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit into the desert, into the silence and the solitude of our own rooms, where we allow ourselves to be freed of all diversions and distractions so as to bare openly before God all that we are, all that we fear, all that we hope for, and all that we need. For as Pascal had noted, “The less we are diverted and distracted, the happier we would be, like the Saints and God!”

Msgr. Geno Sylva