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First Week of Lent: Solidarity Will Transform the World

Egypt
This first week of Lent takes us to Egypt, a land that appears throughout our biblical stories of salvation.Today, it is a country that struggles to provide for its growing population with limited farmland and overdependence on the Nile. More than three times the size of New Mexico, Egypt is home to more than 73 million people, 16 percent of whom live below the poverty line. But it is also a place of hope as women such as Amal of West Aswan defy poverty with the help of small micro-loans that provide the capital for small businesses. The profits pay for food, school fees and a future for their children.

Pray
In Mark's Gospel this weekend we witnessed the forces that propelled Jesus' ministry. The Spirit that rested on him in his Baptism, who named him as God's beloved, now drives him. Jesus is hurtled into a place of testing, and he wins - with the aid of God and the angels. Then the work begins as he proclaims a new world order, God's world order.

Where does the Holy Spirit, residing in us since Baptism, take us when we finally let God drive? Often we end up in places where our faith is tested. To pass the test is to walk into the world with all its temptations, meeting them with the clear vision of one who loves God and God's creation above all else. This was what drove Jesus, and it is the gift he passed to us on the breath of his Spirit. In your prayer this week, ask the Holy Spirit to take the wheel and to drive you into your everyday world with the passion of Jesus. What tempts you away from noticing the needs of the vulnerable, from hearing the cry of the poor? Once named, such temptations can be overcome with the grace of God, so that the work of the Gospel can truly begin.

Fast
Fasting helps us to focus on our great need for God, and it also places us in solidarity with the hunger of others. As global food prices continue to escalate in a severely compromised global economy, the world's most vulnerable people are facing devastating hunger. This Lent consider expanding the tradition of sacrificial abstinence on Fridays to a fast in solidarity with the poor. Give up a meal or two, or try to go an entire day without eating. Use the time volunteering at a food bank, working at a soup kitchen, or shopping for food to donate to a shelter.

Learn
Sometimes a small loan can be the leaven of hope in a poor community. In Egypt, Catholic Relief Services' microfinance projects allow women to rise from poverty by giving them the capital they need to start small businesses. Amal, a mother of six from West Aswan, has used her loan to start a bakery that has in turn allowed her to feed her children and send them to school. Such programs reflect the Church's social teaching on the dignity of work and the rights of workers, which draws from the writings of Pope Leo XIII. In Rerum Nevarum, he taught that with human dignity comes the right to work and to earn enough to provide for oneself and one's family.

Catholic Relief Services' microfinance projects reach more than 1 million people in 36 countries, providing a path to self-employment in places where other work is often not available.

In Egypt, women receive loans of $90 to $350 with which they can raise chickens, bake bread to sell or run small, neighborhood grocery stores. These tiny neighborhood banks typically are made of groups of up to 10 participants who guarantee each other's loans, keeping the default rate low. Such micro-lending programs have helped tens of thousands of Egyptian families become self-sufficient.

Give
To accompany your Lenten practice of fasting and abstinence, estimate the cost of the meals that you would have eaten or the meat you would have purchased but did not because of your fasting. Put the money in your Rice Bowl.

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