Lent has this tendency to surprise me.  It seems to just come out of nowhere.  And with little less than a week away from Ash Wednesday, I find myself in the same situation.  

Each year I embark on Lent as some great adventure that will help me encounter God in new and surprising ways.  As I'm still discerning what practices to take on this Lent, the theme of mercy has piqued my interest.  With all the lively buzz around the Jubilee Year of Mercy, I want this Lent to reflect this important time.  Not that mercy isn't important during other times of the year, but this Jubilee Year is an important reminder of the challenge of being a Christian.  It's about giving and loving when it's inconvenient.  It's about not counting the cost in serving others.  It's about recognizing Jesus in every person we meet.

On New Year’s Eve we are all excited about our resolutions and promises to make this year the best yet. Well, it’s almost the end of January and how many of us have stuck to our resolutions? In my opinion, that’s the problem with resolutions; they are hard to keep. In fact, they may even cause us more stress because we set our expectations so high and then when we don’t keep our resolutions we feel like a failure. Resolution sounds a lot like the big “c” word – commitment and we all know that we don’t have time to commit to one more activity in our busy lives. In fact, the very word “resolution” actually means “to make a firm decision to do or not do something or the action of solving a problem.” Thus, to set a resolution each year declares that there is something broken in our lives and we need to fix it.

As 2016 begins, I have been thinking a lot about solidarity. It’s such a vital part of our Catholic identity. Jesus taught us by word and action what it means to stand with our brothers and sisters—especially those in need—who are not part of our inner circle. And our own U.S. Catholic Bishops call solidarity one of the seven basic foundations of Catholic social teaching. Yet there is so much division in our world and in our country—between countries and continents, between people of different races or religious beliefs, between political parties, between conservatives and liberals, even between neighbors and neighborhoods. It makes me wonder how often we as Church and as individuals practice solidarity. How are we teaching and modeling this virtue in our ministry?