A reminder for Lent

The common theme of these three readings from Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI speaks to me this Lent: Lent is not a self-help program. It is a time to open ourself to the love of God, to the love of others, and to love for God and others. A good reminder to be more Other-focused, more humble, less self-centered - but only possible with grace.

"The purpose of Lent is to keep alive in our consciousness and our life the fact the being a Christian can only take the form of becoming a Christian ever anew; that it is not an event now over and done with but a process requiring constant practice. . . . The human person is the being which does not become itself automatically. . . It becomes itself always and only by struggling against the tendency simply to vegetate and by dint of a discipline that is able to rise about the pressures of routine and to liberate the self from the compulsions of utilitarian goals and instincts. Our world is so full of what immediately impinges on our senses that we are in danger of seeing only details and losing sight of the whole. It takes effort to see beyond what is right in front of us and to free oursleves from the tyranny of what directly presses upon us." ...

"No one becomes a Christian by his own unaided power. No one can make himself a Christian. It is not within the human being's power to shape himself as it were into a great-souled person and finally into a Christian. On the contrary, the process of becoming a Christian begins only with a person sloughs off any illusion of independence and self-sufficiency; when he or she acknowledges that human beings do not create themselves and cannot bring themselves to fulfillment but must open themselves and allow themselves to be led, as it were, to their own true selves. To be a Christian, then, means first and foremost that we acknowledge our own insufficiency and allow him -- the Other who is God -- to act in us"

and finally:
"...the proper attitude to one's I grows spontaneously in an atmosphere of freedom from self. We might well speak here of an anthropological circle: to the degree that we seek only for ourselves, try to realize our own potential, and are concerned solely with the success and fulfillment of our I, to that same degree this I becomes disagreeable, irritable, and repugnant. . . Only the yes that comes to me from a you makes it possible for me to say yes to myself in and through this you. The I realizes itself through a you."