Catholics have been urged to return to God in total conversion, especially as they receive the ashes and commence fasting, almsgiving, and prayers, at the beginning of Lent, and not merely decorate their lives with religious gestures, but truly convert their hearts for good. The charge was given by Most Rev. (Dr.) Alfred Adewale Martins, Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, while giving his Lenten reflection for Ash Wednesday, themed, “The mercy of God that challenges our excuses.” Speaking on the accumulated weight of sin, habit, delay, compromise, and incomplete conversion which distances people from God, Archbishop Martins pointed out that the long and grace-filled discipline of 40 days of Lent, are days given not as a punishment but as a medicine for the soul to achieve what God desires that we become.
He said: “At this moment, when we begin the season of Lent, God says to us with quiet but insistent and unmistakable authority, Now, now, come back to me with all your heart. The Lenten moment is one in which God deliberately interrupts our lethargy. The words, now, now, are an expression of the urgency required of us by God. The words express the mercy of God breaking into our procrastination and our well-rehearsed excuses. “Now, now means even though you believe that you know better, even though you made promises that you failed to keep during the last Lent, even though you are weary of beginning again, come back to me, fasting, weeping, and mourning.”
The Archbishop said God does not wait for when the conditions are perfect but enters into our messy timelines and speaks into moments that we have already written off as spiritually unproductive. According to him, “We often prefer a God in the future, the God who accepts, ‘oh, I will change one day when things settle. When I’m ready, I will change.’ But the God revealed by the Prophet Joel is God of the present, a God who refuses postponement, because delay when it comes to conversion slowly hardens the heart. Grace is always offered in the present tense. Salvation is never deferred.
“Today, Scripture says, if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts. What God asks for is striking in its simplicity. He does not demand competence, righteousness, or self-justification. “He asks for a return. Return presumes that we have wandered. Return admits that we did not drift away accidentally, but we chose other paths. Return is a humbling of the feet that once insisted they knew the way.”
