“Lent is not a time to revile ourselves,” he counseled. “After all, what God loves, we hardly have the right to hate. But the fasting, prayer, and mortifications of the season do have a very important purpose: They help us to clear our soul of debris. They cut away the selfishness that obstructs our view of God and blocks His light from us.”

“Lent is an invitation to dethrone the distractions that keep our hearts restless and empty,” he continued. “If we make room for the real King, He’ll do much more than fill the space. He’ll make us what He intended us to be: saints.”

“So let’s live this Lent not as a burden,” the archbishop said, “but as an amnesty, a joy, a way of refocusing ourselves on the one thing that really does matter eternally — friendship with God.”

"Our Father, who art in heaven…"

You know the rest, don’t you? You recite the "Our Father" every Sunday, you say it when you pray the Rosary, and perhaps you recite it to yourself while you are driving, in line at the store, or before you go to bed. You can say the Lord’s Prayer without even thinking about it. It’s like taking a breath of air, a part of life that can be taken for granted, as sure as the rising and setting of the sun.

That comfort level can be a good thing. But it can also be a problem. Maybe the Our Father is sometimes too easy to recite without paying attention to what it says. Perhaps it becomes too easy to say without stopping to consider what we are actually saying. . . .