Our Lenten Prayer: "lord, That I May See"

Sixth Sunday Integral 2026

Those of us who came of age before or during the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) knew this Sunday before Ash Wednesday as “Quinquagesima Sunday,” or Fifty-Day Sunday. In round numbers, it’s fifty days before Easter. Lent is called Quadragesima in Latin, because it is about forty-days of fasting. In the Extraordinary form, the readings for today center on our moral life. There we hear the awesome thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, St. Paul’s hymn to charity, “Charity is patient, benign . . . not haughty . . .” And the Gospel is from Luke 18, telling how Jesus predicted His passion, death and resurrection, and then on His way to Jerusalem heard a blind beggar. The man sitting on the side of the road asked who was passing and heard “Jesus the Nazorean,” and yelled “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Told to be quiet, he got louder with his plea. Jesus asked what the man wanted and he answered, “Domine, ut videam,” Master, that I may see.

Those words should be our frequent prayer between now and the Triduum (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday). All of us need the fire of the Holy Spirit to penetrate our hearts and minds so that we may be free from sin and energized to walk in Christ’s light as Lent progresses this year.

The Ordinary form readings we hear today complement the ones outlined above. The Old Testament author Jesus ben Sira (first reading) sings a kind of hymn to the commandments, which are set before us as choices between life and death, good and evil. Nobody is fated to be either good or evil; these are free choices of us as free rational beings. “The eyes of God are on those who fear Him; He understands man’s every deed.” His wisdom is immense. God and His attributes are not measurable because He is immaterial, quantum levels above us in His Being. He can see our good and bad actions because He exists as the One who sustains us in being. He knows us better than we know ourselves.

Our psalm today is taken from the long, alphabetically structured praise of God’s Law, Psalm 119, and it asks God to keep us firm in the ways of His statutes. Which ones? The Law of Jesus, the Law of Love. We wish for and want the best for every human being on earth. Demanding? Certainly. Available? Yes, by God’s actual grace.

The reading from 1 Corinthians has a line that indicts the “rulers of this age,” who have no idea about God’s mysterious wisdom, that planned out the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, the God-man. Paul says if they had understood God’s Wisdom in crafting that plan, they never would have crucified Christ. The results would be their utter defeat and the undoing all that the devil wanted.

Our Gospel should govern this year’s Lenten practices. Jesus continues His first sermon in Matthew by expanding on the fifth, sixth and eighth commandments, taking them beyond their root meaning all the way into counsels of self-sacrificial love. For example, not only are we commanded not to kill, but not even to speak ill of another, or call him/her by deprecatory names. That should give us all something to meditate on during the coming forty to fifty days. If we change our behavior for the better, then Jesus says we will be Blessed.

And we all say “Blessed be God forever unto the ages of ages. Amen.”