Yesterday was Ash Wednesday and it marks the beginning of Lent for Catholics worldwide. It?s a time for spiritual reflection, fasting (denying one?s self of daily pleasures) and atonement for offences to God. Being a practicing Catholic, I begin the Lenten season by receiving a mark of the Cross on my forehead with the ashes of last years Easter palms largely as a symbolic gesture of mourning and penance and to remind me that from ashes my physical existence has come and to ashes my physical remains shall return. It is my soul that shall carry on in the hereafter and therefore I need to seek forgiveness from God and bear focus on the well-being of my soul in remembrance of the suffering that Christ endured for the sake my sin.
As the day came to pass, I could not help but feel sadness in my heart as I made my daily rounds on the web. Everywhere I look I saw sadness, depression, poverty, hunger, war, natural disasters and vice on a scale so unprecedented that it causes many to contemplate weather or not we are living in the run-up to the final days. The events that have been streaming across the news wires have given much rise to speculation that even bigger tragedies are right around the corner. Now don?t get me wrong here; I?m not at all trying to sound pessimistic. In fact I?m very much a ?glass-half-full? kinda guy. Even in the worst of times I can take comfort in my faith that there is a better place beyond this dimension that awaits me and all those who believe in Him.
Let me give you just a few examples on what I?m talking about here from the news over the past few days. The Pope was 10 minutes from death as he was rushed to the hospital last week, the terrorists and their supportive r駩mes are moving ever closer toward acquiring nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them, Abbas and Sharon are actually talking serious about peace in the Holy Land which may well result in the feared split of Jerusalem, Russia is going to supply the know terrorist haven of Syria with arms, the sanctity of marriage is under attack and now the mother of all abominations, the British government gives the creator of Dolly the sheep a license to clone human life for medical research!
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