Preparing To Renew Our Baptismal Promises

Lent is the time we prepare ourselves to renew our Baptismal Promises – promises that are at the heart of our relationship with our God; with Jesus andwith his Church. Preparation and renew are words that sound like work, and they are. But we have been praying, fasting and almsgiving. This helps us to complete our preparation.

Lent also calls us to work on the “do you” questions – the questions we answer every week when we say the Creed. At the Easter Vigil we renew our answers to the (do you renounce” and “do you believe” questions.  Renewing and answering these questions will involve work on our heart, on our minds and, yes, we will need all of our strength.

The Lenten Season, then, is a wonderful time to get personal with ourselves and to let God get personal with us. We need to look into our prayer, our fasting and our almsgiving. Prayer is just that; it is opening our hearts and our minds to God. Helping us know why we fast or why we pray and why we need to love the poor. Fasting is learning how to say yes to God and no to ourselves. Almsgiving is simply loving the poor.  

So Lent is a time to do maintenance on our prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Or another way of looking at prayer, fastening and almsgiving is to see them maintaining our faith, hope and love – to see if they are complying with what is in our hearts and our minds. Like all things that need maintenance, we will need the tools, time and space, and a maintenance person. Let’s let Jesus Christ be that person; he will know what to fix or renew.

Father Gallegos serves as Chaplain of the Daughters of Charity Seton Residence in Evansville.