Dear Holy Trinity Family,

As we just passed to mark a midpoint of our Lenten journey with the Suffering Christ, I hope and pray that your journey has been a smooth sailing and now you may have some clear direction toward a conversion of your heart and mind. So that you may fully be open to God’s will and His superabundance grace on Easter. To point out our possible direction for next two and half weeks of our remaining time in Lent, I would like to share two events that led me to further meditate on a meaning of Lent. Two separate things took place on my weekdays: the first one is a funeral Mass, and the other one is filing a prior year tax return. They seem totally different and unrelated; however, they were indeed well connected to one another in my meditation. The first event of funeral Mass was to concelebrate at a funeral Mass of my best friend’s mother. My best friend is Fr. Steve Correz from Orange Diocese. He is more than my best friend; he is my classmate from a seminary for 8 years of priestly formation and a member of my priest support group for 30 plus years. There are no secrets between us, and we see each other very regularly. For this reason, we have come to consider each other not as a friend but a brother. Especially, when he buried his twin brother, who was also a seminarian at that time of his death, on August 26, my birthday, I consoled then seminarian Steve with this saying, “today you lost your twin brother, but you gained another brother, me, on this day of one death and one birth that we are celebrating.” Since then, we became “brothers.” Whenever I have had a chance to see his mother, Mary, she always showed her love and warmth to me as if I were his own son. Seeing her cold body in an open casket before her funeral Mass began, I recalled the wards “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” which we heard on Ash Wednesday as we received ashes on our forehead. Lent is all about our embracing the death of Jesus and we must remember where we shall return to.

After filing back taxes on weekdays, I also recalled what Jesus said to the Pharisees when they asked Jesus about paying the census tax to Caesar or not, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25) There are many things we have received from God and among them, out of our gratitude to God, we must give back something to God. Lent is our opportunity to give to God what belongs to God – our whole being through prayers, fasting, and almsgiving. What have we given to God so far? If we are still retaining what belong to God as our own possession, why not we try to give what belongs to God little by little each day. Each one of us must discover what we must give back to God in this season of Lent so that we may be ready to see the glory of God in the Risen Christ on Easter Sunday.

We must go to our eternal home, a place we lost by the Sin, and this going back to our lost home is all about belonging to God once again. May, by the grace of God, we evermore be blessed each day and every day until the kingdom of God fulfills in our plain sight!

Blessings,

Fr. Brian