A woman participates in the celebration of Ash Wednesday at the cathedral in Managua, on March 1, 2017. (Photo credit: INTI OCON/AFP/Getty Images)
By Fr Richard Gennaro Cipolla Ash Wednesday, 2021 The season of Lent is so very strongly associated with the verb “to turn”. When we talk about the goal of the conversion of body, mind, heart and soul that is the goal of the Christian life and that is certainly the proximate goal of Lenten exercises such as fasting, prayer and alms giving, we use several forms of the basic word which comes from the Latin verb verto. This verb means “to turn “ in its most basic sense. But it has many compounds, each of which give a new meaning to this basic act of turning. The same is true in English, in those words that have the Latin verto as their root. The season of Lent is indeed a liturgical preparation for the feast of Easter and Eastertide. It is a preparation for that basic affirmation of our faith that is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it also has an intensely personal side to it: getting ourselves in spiritual shape once again after a period of forgetting who we are as Catholics and what we should be doing in our lives to prevent our forgetting this. Lent is supposed to be a spiritual wake-up call, at least for most of us. On Ash Wednesday we always hear that wonderful reading from the prophet Joel:
