Encourage reflection on life and preparation for Easter.

Dear brothers and sisters, dear youth, have you ever considered the value of silence in your life? Or do you not even have the time, like many people today? Indeed, today man is deeply struck inside by the heftiness of this time, which influences his thinking and actions. However, we, concrete people, create that time. We want to do everything as soon as possible, travel, and visit foreign countries to see and get to know each other as much as possible. Therefore, we often do not have time to be quiet and look inside ourselves, knowing the truth about God and ourselves. As if we were afraid to look at ourselves, who we really are, and where we are going.
Someone said that today’s man has a panic fear of silence and loneliness, and therefore even when walking up a mountain or park, he takes a walking man with him so that he does not remain without a companion. He does not want to think about himself, his inner self, about the essential things in his life because it is uncomfortable and difficult. It is much easier to deal with external issues, which, however, are not important for a man at all.

The Gospel of the first Sunday of Lent says how the Spirit of God led Jesus into the wilderness, where he was forty days, and Satan tempted him (cf. Mk 1:12).
For us Central Europeans, the desert, the endless arid land, is distant. We have no specific experience with it. Today, we can imagine it quite well, because we get a lot of knowledge about it from various media, but these are all just images. We cannot sufficiently understand the lives of those who live their lives in such an environment.
For Jesus, and also for others who were or are in constant contact with her, she was and is much closer. The Holy Land, where Jesus lived, worked, and taught, is in the middle of many deserts. It is like an oasis of life among them. For the Israelites, the desert was a constant threat. In particular, life-giving water, which the sandy surface cannot maintain, was and is missing. Therefore, this place is a symbol of death and evil. A desert is a place of emptiness and temptation and peace, silence, preparation, maturation, self-knowledge, purification, and God’s closeness. Here one may best experience one’s personal contact with God. In the desert, he is no longer interested in unnecessary things and focuses on fundamental values, especially God’s most basic. It is not necessary to go looking for such a desert somewhere in Asia or Africa. It can also be created in the middle of the city, as claimed by the well-known spiritual writer Carlo Carretto. We can say that the desert is not a place but a time. A time in which a person is immersed in God’s nearness and intensively prepares for an event in his life. It is a time of prayer and meditation. Then God is very close to man.
However, the devil, a great intelligent person, knows this and therefore attacks the most. He engages wherever God works and seeks to thwart His plans. That is why, in the eyes of the Israelites, the desert was a symbol of Satan’s rule. On the Day of Atonement, they took the goats on which they had previously committed their transgressions to the wilderness to perish in the place of evil.

On the other hand, the Bible often speaks of the desert as a place to prepare for important events in the lives of individuals and the nation. After leaving Egyptian slavery, the Israelites wandered forty years in the wilderness until they were cleansed of their sins and were able to enter the Promised Land (cf. Nm 14:34). Moses fasted for forty days before God gave him the tablets of the law (cf. Ex 34:28). John the Baptist also lived in the desert, and people came to him. He, too, prepared a great event in the life of all humanity (cf. Mt 3: 4). Jesus prepared for his performance and work by staying in the desert. He was aware of the work that the Father had given him to do on earth, and therefore he wanted to join him deeply in the wilderness. Nor was he spared the temptation of Satan. This proves that Jesus was a true man. According to some biblical scholars, the evangelist Marek links him indirectly to his ancestor Adam. Adam – an older man – succumbed to temptation. Christ – the new man – resisted. This is the beginning of his messianic work. After preparing in the wilderness, he returns among the people and announces the fullness of time and the coming of God’s kingdom.

Let us ask ourselves, “What does the desert mean to us? What is the desert in our lives? ” Maybe it’s something annoying that often bothers us. Maybe broken relationships, alcohol, drugs, money, or something. We feel all this in our lives as a certain evil. We may not be able to get out of this, and with frequent falls, the further we go, the more we dive into our personal desolate desert. We see behind this a strong influence of evil, which pushes us to the ground.
But let’s try to look at it from the other side. After all, the desert is not only evil and hopeless but also the intense presence of God. He’s looking for us right here, in our desert. He is quite close to us, with every fall and every difficulty that comes upon us. God knows we are weak, and we need help. He wants to heal us from our misery, but it is up to us to say “yes” to him. Let’s make this our minds let go of how we draw closer to God. Let’s create the second desert on it, which we understand preparing for an important event in life. It will be a time for us to get rid of unnecessary things and focus on our inner self, know ourselves, and our real, unadulterated needs, of which God is the first and basic.
For this purpose, it is important to eliminate the superfluous things that occupy our minds and a large part of our lives. It can be something different for each of us. For example, TV, gossip, slander, discos, and much more. It is necessary to focus on the most important thing: contact with God. Because of this, it is not necessary to leave the world. We can happily survive this preparation in the middle of the city. Only one thing is necessary: ​​to direct one’s mind to God.
We can see for ourselves in our personal experience that it is appropriate and necessary. In life, we encounter situations where someone is preparing, for example, for their profession, or another important thing, or a decision in their life. Even young people who want to become priests before receiving priestly ordination are retreating to their imaginary desert, where they are preparing for this important moment. The spiritual exercises, which are obligatory for the priesthood candidates, serve to intensely get to know themselves before God, in proximity to God. It is a period of silence as they listen to God and know themselves, their insides so that they can freely and responsibly receive the sacrament of the priesthood. We can observe such preparation in silence on other occasions.

We will show how important and useful the desert is for man, which we understand as a time of preparation, peace, and silence so that he can know himself truthfully and undistorted. People from the city came to the hermit and asked him, “What do you see as the meaning of your life in such silence?” It was then that the hermit was drawing water from a deep reservoir. He told the visitors: “Look at the tank! What do you see? ” They were silent because they did not quite understand his question. After a while, he urged them again to look in the tank. They did so again and said, “Yes, we see ourselves now!” The hermit told them, “You see, when I drank water before, it was upset. She’s quiet now. And the experience of silence? One sees oneself. “

This hermit understood life and his role in this world. Silence helped him focus on core values ​​— getting to know himself near God. At the same time, he was not employed by many useless things that take so much of the time of today’s people. He was quietly preparing for the most important event of his life, the encounter with the Lord. It was in silence that he recognized what the most important event of his life is. It is also an encouragement for us to seek God in our wilderness, in the silence in which he makes himself known and reveals to us what we really are, what we really need, and what is more of an obstacle to us, without which one can do without in life.

At the beginning of the Great Lent, I want to challenge myself and you to consciously retreat to the desert. It will be our time to prepare for the amazing event of Easter. How else can we prepare well for these greatest holidays in the church year, rather than getting closer to God, who is the fundamental value for our lives? Let’s look for God in our very desert of life because he is waiting for us right there. Let us make more room to meet more often in silence with God, who will then be able to deliver us from our problems. After our stay in the desert of the fasting season, after our self-knowledge and self-destruction, we will be able to experience much deeper and more internally the great mystery of Christ’s resurrection. Of course, we would not be able to do much with our own efforts alone, so let us give ourselves a warm commitment to Christ, who himself will accompany us on this journey.

Let us pray: Lord Jesus, you have come to this world to proclaim to us the truth about God and man. You redeemed us with your cross and resurrection. After days of forty days of fasting, we will once again celebrate the mystery of Easter this year. We now want to prepare properly for this, cleanse our hearts of unnecessary requests, and focus on the only thing needed to live near you. You be with us in this desert of our prayer and silence and help us get to know you and ourselves better and what is necessary for eternal life.