We are prodigal children. We have in many ways squandered our Father’s inheritance. Provided with a wonderful garden to live in, we poison its air, we pollute its water, we erode its topsoil.

Provided with a wonderful family with whom to share our lives, we condemn many of our family members to survival-level existence; we refuse to associate with many of them, and we contribute to their death.

Lent is a time to ‘pass over,’ to pass from the world of injustice we have created over to a world of reconciliation. It is a time to “turn hatred to love, conflict to peace, death to eternal life.”

We know that such a turn can take place because we have a Father who sees us while we are still a long way off, who catches sight of us and is deeply moved, who will run out to meet us, throw his arms around our necks and kiss us.

We know that such a turn can take place because Jesus Christ brought mankind the gift of reconciliation by the suffering and death he endured.

The message of Lent, therefore, is clear: “we implore you, in Christ’s name: be reconciled to God.”

The first step, of course, is to do what the younger son did: “I will break away and return to my father, and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against you.’”

Such a confession will enable us to “hasten toward Easter with the eagerness of faith and love,” and it will make possible the rejoicing which today’s liturgy foretells and encourages.

This kingdom and this salvation ... are available to every human being as grace and mercy, and yet at the same time each individual must gain them ... through toil and suffering, through a life lived according to the gospel, through abnegation and the cross, through the spirit of the beatitudes. But above all each individual gains them through a total interior renewal which the gospel calls metanoia; it is a radical conversion, a profound change of mind and heart.

Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 10, 1975.