WALLS
If you walk through the woods of New England, you will, in what seems like the middle of nowhere, come across miles and miles of stone walls. Two or three hundred years ago, these walls were very important. They marked off property lines, defined roads, and kept the cows and sheep within the pastures and the other animals out. 
Now, these walls are irrelevant. Trees have grown up in the middle of them, the wind and rain have tumbled them down, little streams and brooks run through them, leaves and pine needles cover them. They are relics of a bygone time. They no longer have a role to play in the forest which has grown around them.
I come across them, and think about the polarization that seems so evident in our world. Whoever isn’t with us is against us. Who’s in, and who’s out. Who really belongs, and whom do we exclude? We’re still building walls.
Seeing these walls in the woods gives me hope that perhaps sometime in the future, if life and nature can take their course, the walls we build today might become irrelevant in their turn. I make my own the prayer of Jesus: “That all might be one.”
Fr. Roger Lamoureux, OMI
LENT
I’ve been struck by the way our Catholic practices of
Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, involve the whole person,
body and
soul. As a sacramental
Church, our prayer very much involves a physical, bodily dimension.
Almsgiving requires an open generous heart as well as an open
hand. And fasting is as
much a spiritual discipline as it is a physical one.
As human beings, both body and soul are destined for the
glory of heaven. Body
and soul each have their own part to play in experiencing God’s life
today. The practices of
Lent help to place appropriate limits and boundaries on both so that
they cooperate together in experiencing the graces that God desires
us to have.
May
the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely,
spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ. The one
who calls you is faithful, and he will also accomplish it.
--1st Thessalonians 5: 23 – 24
Fr.
Roger E. Lamoureux OMI
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