This 4th Sunday of Lent is known as Laetare Sunday. The entrance antiphon for this Sunday in Latin is “Laetare Jerusalem” or “Rejoice, Jerusalem”. We are halfway through Lent now, and the Church gives us this Sunday to add in a little ‘rejoicing’. The pre-siders have the option of wearing rose-colored vestments, which just like during Advent, is seen as a mixture of the regular Lenten purple and the upcoming white of Easter. We can add in some greenery or flowers to the sanctuary. We aren’t in the Easter sea-son yet, so we aren’t going to go crazy and sing the Gloria or Alle-luia or pull out the Easter lilies! We are still in Lent and it is time to renew our resolutions and make sure we’re still on the right path. If you haven’t been good lately on whatever it was you were ‘giving up’ during Lent (chocolate, candy, pop, etc…), it’s time to get back into it; if you were going to do something extra like pray more, it’s time to rejuvenate that prayer! We’re almost to Easter! Stay strong!
Our music reminds us, once again, that we are still in this Lenten season. Our opening hymn “In These Days of Lenten Journey” reminds us of the three pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting and alms-giving, and how we can make these present in our lives: pray for righteousness, reach out to the homeless, listen to the weary, show our compassion and care. This song gives us great ideas on how to jumpstart our Lent if we’ve forgotten about these three aspects!
Our Gospel this weekend is the healing of the blind man. Reread this Gospel this week and meditate on it! John 9:1-41. There’s so much good in that reading that can’t be done justice in a 5-minute homily or a bulletin article!
Our song during the presentation of the gifts is “You Are the Heal-ing”, obviously referring to Jesus’ powers of healing and it is writ-ten in the style of an African-American spiritual - yet another style of music where we can glorify God in our singing. Our Catholic history gives us a wealth of musical styles to sing and praise God in – both in traditional hymnody such as our closing song “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” (with a text from the mid 1800s and melody from about 1710!), to two different styles/timeframes of contemporary music at communion with “Shepherd Me, O God” from 1986 and “Come, Follow Me” in 1999, to the spiritual at
offertory (but written in 1992), to our opening song of “In These Days of Lenten Journey” written in 1997.
The 4th week of Lent is here. Let’s get out there and finish strong! Keep praying, fasting and giving alms.