Whare has our Lent gone?

Haven't they been showing us the way?   This picture was taken at the beginning of Lent, at the Vatican.  It was the time when Bishop Erik Varden, a Trappist, was leading Pope Leo, an Augustinian, on a Lenten retreat.  For me, this could easily be the photo of the year for it shows two great men together in a most revealing pose, one of listening, of engaging in real conversation.  Isn't this a pose of leadership in a world where people just shoot from the hip, full stop.  

In his last reflection, Varden prophetically shared.  

"Christ calls us to communicate hope to the world. To have Christian hope is not necessarily to be an optimist. A Christian forswears wishful thinking, making a determined option for the real. Demagogues promise that things will get better. They claim demiurgical power to change communities within an electoral term, distracting the masses from felt disappointments by hand-outs of bread, tickets to circuses, and defamations of adversaries. 

How different are Christ’s words. He tells us, ‘The poor you will always have with you.’ He affirms that nation will rise against nation. Persecutions will come. A man’s enemies will be members of his own household. There is no lame resignation in these statements. The Lord obliges us, his disciples, to labour without respite for a new, healthy humanity formed by charity, in justice. He tells us to ‘cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons’. We are to enact the beatitudes, making the glory hidden within them shine. But as we go about this we are reminded: ‘Without me you can do nothing.’  

Christ is the light of the nations.  He alone, doing the Father’s will, acting in the Spirit, can renew the face of the earth. In him we put our trust, not in passing stratagems.  He can act through us if we consent to being patient. Lent shows us that God, suffering the wound of his philanthropy, is at his most active in his Passion. The hope he entrusts to us is not hope in a finally modernised, digitised, sanitised Vale of Tears. Our hope is in a new heaven, a new earth, in the resurrection of the dead.  

The time in which we live is hungry to hear this hope proclaimed." 

I read this and am left speechless.  What can I add to that?   What do I need to add?  Words are not needed.  It is time rather to continue our Lenten fast for time is left and there is much to ponder, much to do. Happy Lent!