Dear Parish Family,

On this Third Sunday of Lent, as we approach the halfway point of our Lenten journey, the Scriptures draw our attention to nature, where we encounter both the Burning Bush and the Fig Tree. In this encounter, with Moses, with Jesus and his disciples, we are asked to reflect on our ‘growth experience’. We are invited to reflect on not how we are growing, but on how it is that we are being grown, how it is that we are being trained, shaped and re-shaped. It is an important distinction to keep in mind and heart.

God doesn’t do this cultivating in isolation. God plants us in community, with others. It is in community, in the art of growing in communion with one another, that we are cultivated, shaped, trained, to reflect back our true character, to reflect back the work of the Gardener. And this work of the Gardener is what we call Mercy.

The ‘burning bush’ is one of the favorite images for reflection for St. Thomas Aquinas. He sees in this image the presence of God in all of his creation without destroying nature itself. He also reflects on the nature of the self-revealing God in deep relationship with the creation, which is all good. The human beings endowed with will and wisdom share in depth the nature and likeness of God. It is in humans that Mercy finds great power.

It is in and through Mercy that we are trained, grown, and shaped. It is in our practicing Mercy that we are trained, grown, and shaped. It is how we experience Mercy that we are trained, grown, and shaped. None of this is easy, in fact it can be difficult. We all know this to be true - in how we hurt, or how we’ve been hurt; in how we forgive and sometimes struggle to forgive; in how we hold one another accountable; in how we are humbled or practice humility; in how we love.

In one of his sermons, Augustine talks about Mercy as being “heart-sore” - that in Mercy, our heart aches for others, our heart aches for the Other (God), our heart aches for wholeness, so much so that we are consumed in Mercy, by Mercy, like the Burning Bush and, at the same time, are charged not to give up on one another, just as God doesn’t give up on caring for us, as we hear in the gospel about the gardener not giving up on the Fig Tree.

Lent is a time when the Church calls us to be attentive to this art of Mercy - to cultivation and to being cultivated in the garden of life. Lent is a word that in its root actually means spring. In Lent, there is always the promise of springtime, there is always the promise of Easter, where once again we can be surprised by grace and reflect back to one another the Art and the Mercy of God.