Totus Tuus - Totus 2us

Catechesis by Papa Benedict XVI      
_{General Audience, Ash Wednesday, 13 February 2013 - in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese & Spanish}

"Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today, Ash Wednesday, we begin the liturgical time of Lent, forty days that prepare us for the celebration of Holy Easter; it is a time of particular commitment on our spiritual pathway. The number forty occurs several times in Sacred Scripture. In particular, as we know, it recalls the forty years in which the people of Israel wandered in the desert: a long period of formation to become the people of God, but also a long period in which the temptation to be unfaithful to the covenant with the Lord was always present. Forty were also the days of journeying for the prophet Elijah to reach the Mountain of God, Horeb, as well as the period that Jesus spent in the desert before beginning his public life and where he was tempted by the devil. In this catechesis I would like to dwell on this moment of the earthly life of the Lord, which we will read in the Gospel next Sunday.

First of all the desert, where Jesus withdrew to, is a place of silence, of poverty, where man is deprived of material support and finds himself facing the fundamental questions of existence, is driven to go to the essential and exactly because of this it becomes easier for him to meet God. But the desert is also a place of death, because where there is no water there is no life, and it is a place of solitude, in which man more intensely feels temptation. Jesus goes into the desert, and there undergoes the temptation to leave the way indicated by the Father to follow other easier and more worldly roads (cf Lk 4:1-13). Thus He bears our temptations, takes upon Himself our misery, so as to conquer the evil one and to open to us the pathway to God, the pathway of conversion.

To reflect on the temptations which Jesus underwent in the desert is an invitation for each of us to answer a fundamental question: what really matters in my life? In the first temptation the devil proposes to Jesus that he change a stone into bread so as to sate his hunger. Jesus replies that man also lives by bread, but not by bread alone: ​​without a response to the hunger for truth, to the hunger for God, man cannot be saved (cf v 3-4). In the second temptation, the devil proposes to Jesus the way of power: he leads him up on high and offers him dominion of the world; but this is not God's road: Jesus was very clear that it is not worldly power that saves the world, but the power of the cross, of humility, of love (cf v 5-8). In the third temptation, the devil proposes to Jesus that he throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem and make himself be saved by God through His angels, that is, to do something sensational to put God himself to the test; but the response is that God is not an object on which to impose our conditions: He is the Lord of all (cf v 9-12). What is the core of the three temptations that Jesus undergoes? It is the proposal to manipulate God, to use Him for one's own interests, for one's own glory and for one's own success. And thus, in essence, to put oneself in the place of God, removing Him from one's own existence and making Him seem superfluous. Therefore everyone should ask themselves: what place has God in my life? Is He the Lord or am I?

To overcome the temptation to subordinate God to oneself and to one's own interests or to put Him in a corner, and to convert oneself to the right order of priorities, to give God the first place, is a pathway that every Christian must travel again and again. "To convert", an invitation that we will hear many times in Lent, means to follow Jesus in such a way that his Gospel is the concrete guide of life; it means to let God transform us, to stop thinking that we are the only constructors of our existence; it means to recognize that we are creatures, that we depend on God, on his love, and only by "losing" our life in Him can we gain it. This demands making our choices in the light of the Word of God. Today we can no longer be Christians as a simple consequence of the fact of living in a society that has Christian roots: even those who are born in a Christian family and educated religiously must, every day, renew the choice to be Christian, that is, to give God the first place, in front of the temptations that a secularized culture proposes to them continuously, in front of the critical judgment of many contemporaries.

The tests to which modern society subjects Christians, in fact, are many, and affect both personal and social life. It is not easy to be faithful to Christian marriage, to practice mercy in daily life, to leave space for prayer and inner silence; it is not easy to publicly oppose choices that many consider obvious, such as abortion in the case of unwanted pregnancy, euthanasia in the case of serious illness, or the selection of embryos so as to prevent hereditary diseases. The temptation to set aside one's own faith is always present and conversion becomes a response to God which must be confirmed many times in life.

There are as an example and stimulus the great conversions such as that of St Paul on the way to Damascus, or of St Augustine, but also in our time of eclipses of the sense of the sacred, the grace of God is at work and works wonders in the lives of so many people. The Lord never tires of knocking at the door of man in social and cultural contexts that seem swallowed up by secularization, as happened with the Russian Orthodox Pavel Florensky. After a completely agnostic education, so much so that he felt outright hostility to the religious teachings taught in school, the scientist Florensky found himself exclaiming: "No, one cannot live without God!", and completely changed his life, so much so that he became a priest.

I also think of the figure of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch girl of Jewish origin who died in Auschwitz. Initially far from God, she discovered him by looking in depth inside herself and wrote: "A very deep well is inside of me. And God is in that well. Sometimes I manage to reach him, more often stones and sand cover the well: then God is buried. I need again to unearth him." (Diary, 97). In her scattered and restless life, she found God right in the midst of the great tragedy of the 20th century, the Holocaust. This fragile and dissatisfied young girl, transfigured by faith, is transformed into a woman full of love and inner peace, capable of affirming: "I live constantly in intimacy with God."

The capacity to oppose the ideological flattery of her time so as to choose the search for truth and to open herself to the discovery of faith is demonstrated by another woman of our time, the American Dorothy Day. In her autobiography, she confesses openly of having fallen into the temptation of resolving everything with politics, adhering to the Marxist cause: "I wanted to go with the protesters, to go to prison, to write, to influence others and to leave my dream to the world. How much ambition and how much self-seeking there was in all this!" The pathway to faith in so secularized an environment was particularly difficult, but Grace acts all the same, as she herself stresses: "It is certain that I felt more often the need to go to church, to kneel down, to bow my head in prayer. A blind instinct, one might say, because I was not conscious of praying. But I went, I slipped into the atmosphere of prayer...". God led her to a conscious adherence to the Church, in a life dedicated to the underprivileged.

In our time there are no few conversions understood as the return of those who, after a perhaps superficial Christian education, are distanced for years from the faith and then rediscover Christ and his Gospel. In the Book of the Apocalypse we read: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him, eat with him and he with me" (3:20). Our inner man must prepare to be visited by God, and precisely for this reason must not let himself be invaded by illusions, by appearances, by material things.

In this time of Lent, in the Year of faith, we renew our commitment on the pathway of conversion, so as to overcome the tendency to close in on ourselves and to make, instead, space for God, looking with his eyes at daily reality. The alternative between the closing in of our egoism and the opening to the love of God and others, we could say corresponds to the alternatives of the temptations of Jesus: the alternative, that is, between human power and love of the Cross, between a redemption viewed solely on material well-being and a redemption as the work of God, to whom we give the primacy in existence. Conversion means not closing in on oneself in the search for one's own success, one's own prestige, one's own position, but making sure that every day, in the little things, truth, faith in God and love become the most important thing."