First of all, let me start by wishing you all a happy Palm Sunday! We are entering the holiest week on the liturgical calendar, and I’m sure that I’m not the only one who finds it emotional to recall the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
I’m finding it much easier to get into the spirit of Holy Week than I did trying to get into the spirit of Lent. This has probably been one of the worst Lents I have ever had. And I have no one to blame but myself. I didn’t choose something to give up for Lent before this season started, and I only thought of a discipline to follow in the last week or so. And I didn’t even do a very do a very good job following that!
Although it just started today, Holy Week seems like it is going to be much more spiritually profitable. I had a meeting with my therapist yesterday, and one of the things he touched on was my desire to always be in control. This desire, unfortunately, shows up in my spiritual life as well. When I fall into masturbation, I usually feel very frustrated if I feel like there isn’t some behavior that I can change in order to avoid falling into that sin again. For example, after falling into masturbation, I might come to the conclusion that I gave into that sin because I was stressed out or tense, and I start thinking about how I can eliminate the stress and tension in my life. I might decide to work out more or drink less caffeine. And while these things may certainly help to some extent, eventually I’m going to come to the point where I’ve done all that is humanly possible to avoid the sin of masturbation, but I will still fall into it. So the only thing I can do at this point is to realize that I am powerless to control my desire to masturbate on my own. It’s much stronger than I am. Instead of focusing what I can do to avoid falling into masturbation, I need to focus on praying to God during times of temptation — something I tend to neglect — and focus on what He can do to help me avoid falling into sin.
I also really got a lot out of the liturgy for Palm Sunday. For those of you who do not know, the Gospel reading at today’s Mass is the story of the passion of Jesus Christ. It speaks a lot about how he suffered: how he was scourged, how he hung on the cross until he died, even though he had done nothing to deserve such a punishment. Few if any of us suffer like that, but we all have some sufferings in our lives. Jesus of course is our example for how to handle this suffering. He has total trust in the Father, so he can accept whatever suffering comes his way. We hear that trust in today’s Gospel reading:
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