Tom Thomas –
It is 2 am in the morning and I can’t sleep. My body affected by what is known as jet lag, travelling through multiple time zones and over multiple continents in under 24 hours. It will take me some time, maybe few days, to get adjusted back to normal routine. Travel is tough, physically demanding and also expensive, demanding that one has to separate oneself from the familiar and embrace the unfamiliar, new surroundings and people.
Yet travel can be immensely rewarding and necessary for the people to people connection that no amount of digital meetings can bring. Huge preparations are required for travel abroad though. Securing the necessary visa, travel and accommodation arrangements and needed funding to be organised even before one can get on that airplane. And yet, we do plan journeys and travel towards hope – hope of favourable meetings with those we are to meet in expected and unexpected encounters and also hope that the weather and other conditions are favourable in the places we travel to.
This travel-based effort reminds me of the preparations we need to make for Lent each year. Why do we take the effort to travel to Him, and how can we do it effectively.
The preparations for the journey require sacrifice. Fasting, penance and almsgiving. We also need to travel light and depend less on external things during this time. The more we prepare the greater our internal transformation. And the journey must change us in some form, otherwise why undertake the journey in the first place?
The experiences that the writer Joyce Rupp who walked the Camino de Santiago with a friend and wrote a book based upon this experience called Walk in a relaxed manner: Life lessons from the Camino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, c. 2005) come to mind. She starts her pilgrim journey saying:
“Imagine walking on a path where millions of feet from other lands and cultures have previously walked, feet that have trod hundreds of miles to reach a sacred site. Think of what it would be like to have that same path and those same stones beneath your feet as you, too, walk for many weeks to reach the same destination (p. 26).”
This seems to be similar to the path we walk in Lent. This Lenten path that has been walked by our parents and grandparents ahead of us. Joyce Rupp says, ‘Each of us has a Camino, a road of life. This road allows us access to the spiritual richness of those who have travelled before us and those who travel with us now’ (p. 32).
In today’s consumeristic society where faith takes a back seat often in deference to the world, the need to fast from what one likes, a Lenten practise recommended by the Church, seems rather difficult and at times even impossible. I have witnessed the staunch discipline of my father during these periods, the resolve not to touch what he wanted to give up for lent during a time period which is not so short. That resolve sometimes wanes in me, especially when I am at a function or party during Lent and that non veg dish or drink entices me. Yet, I understand that holding on to my resolve like my father did is one of the steps to make me prepare for lent, to make me lighter and travel further with others.
On our recent trip abroad, the lesson to travel light was reinforced by the difficulty we had in hauling around lots of luggage with so many clothes we did not use at all during the journey. Most of our other travellers were indeed travelling light. They could move around more freely than us. My brother-in-law gave us some advice, ‘Pack what you need, then throw half of that out.’ It is hard to do that!
The Lenten practises of fasting, prayer and almsgiving indeed make us light, helping us to travel faster to our goal of hearing Him more clearly. The challenge is to follow this practise.
Holy Father Pope Francis, in his letter for Lent this year proposes a few reflections on what it means to journey together in hope this Lenten season, and on the call to conversion that God in his mercy addresses to all of us — as individuals and as a community.
The Holy Father mentions a first call to conversion comes from the realisation that all of us are pilgrims in this life. Each of us is invited to stop and ask how our lives reflect this fact. Am I really on a journey or am I standing still, not moving, either immobilised by fear and hopelessness or reluctant to move out of my comfort zone? Am I seeking ways to leave behind the occasions of sin and situations that degrade my dignity?
Holy Father mentions that the second call is to journey together. The Church is called to walk together, to be synodal. Christians are called to walk at the side of others and never as lone travellers. The Holy Spirit compels us not to remain self-absorbed, but to leave ourselves behind, and keep walking towards God and our brothers and sisters. In particular the following lines call out to me, ‘It means walking side-by-side, without shoving or stepping on others, without envy or hypocrisy, without letting anyone be left behind or excluded. Let us all walk in the same direction, tending towards the same goal, attentive to one another in love and patience.’
The third call to conversion mentioned in the Holy Father’s letter is for us to journey together in hope, for we have been given a promise.
The Holy Father exhorts us that may the hope that does not disappoint (Romans 5:5) — the central message of the Jubilee — be the focus of our Lenten journey towards the victory of Easter. He says: ‘Let us ask ourselves: Am I convinced that the Lord forgives my sins? Or do I act as if I can save myself? Do I long for salvation and call upon God’s help to attain it? Do I concretely experience the hope that enables me to interpret the events of history and inspires in me a commitment to justice and fraternity, to care for our common home and in such a way that no one feels excluded.’
Let us journey towards that hope. Each journey starts with a first step, then another and so on until we reach the destination.
Many things on our recent journey reinforce the sentiments expressed in Pope Francis’ Lenten letter for me. I did not make the journey alone as I usually would have done, I was accompanied by my better half and our shared journey was rich and full of memorable moments of hope. One of them we experienced on a chilly, rainy morning on the outskirts of Glasgow, when trying to find a church near our hotel, a kindly aged soul opens the church for us to pray and even gets her car to drop us back to our hotel, which would have been a difficult walk back in the rain. We are filled with hope at the random acts of kindness by total strangers we experienced in this journey.
We need to reflect that hope too, as others look to us. A brilliant talk by Msgr James Shea delivered as the Keynote Address at the 2025 National Catholic Prayer Breakfast on the theme on Pope Francis’ Lenten letter of the journey towards hope uplifts my understanding.
I ask myself now. What step can I take today towards my Lenten journey of hope ultimately leading to the Easter that awaits me?
‘Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light.’ — Archbishop Fulton Sheen : Life of Christ
