Real Life, Leading to Lent

Taken from The Liturgical Year, by Joan Chittister:  (emphasis added)

"The world around us tells us that life is about money, security, power, and success.  Yet the Gospels tell us that life is about something completely other.  Real life, the Gospels tell us, is about doing the will of God, speaking for the poor, changing the lives of widows and orphans, exalting the status of women, refusing to make war, laying down our lives for the other, the invisible, and the enemy.  It is about taking everyone in instead of leaving anyone out.  When we learn that, after years of being steeped in the lessons of one liturgical year after another, then life changes for everyone.  The fruit of contemplation is oneness with the world."

"Self-indulgence, the preening of the self for the sake of the self, blocks out the cries of the rest of the world, makes us deaf to anything beyond ourselves.  The starving continue to starve while the self-indulgent feast and, full of the good things they have wrested from life, think they have done a good thing...
"Self-centeredness makes us the center of the universe.  The notion that all things were made for our comfort and our control robs those around us of their own gifts.  It absorbs the gifts of others; it smothers them under our own; it blinds us to both their needs and their gifts....
"[In asceticism] We become aware of what is necessary in life, rather than wasting all life's energies on what is at most cosmetic.  We gain the kind of consciousness that is lost in the fog of alcohol or gluttony, agitated by lust, consumed by greed.  We learn the greatest gift of all-- freedom from the demands of the self for the good of the flowering of the spirit.
"It is these things that the great fast, Lent, comes to give us so that, rather than being persuaded and distracted by the things of the world around us, we can learn to keep our inner eye on the world to come.  The asceticism of Lent comes to train us, like spiritual athletes, to keep our eyes, with Jesus, on the road to Jerusalem.  Then, perhaps, we will come, like Jesus, to see the sick and the lame, the outcast and the foreigner in our own world and bend to heal them, stop to listen to them, reach out to raise them from the dead edges of society to new life."