Lent continues! Its rhyme and rhythm rolls on, with us, without us, or in spite of us. Where are we with our Lenten observance? Is the season passing us by?

On this Second Sunday of Lent, our Gospel reading moves us from last week’s account of the desert - with its wild animals and temptations - to the glory of the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. Every year, this same process is followed by the Church: from the desert to the glory. There is an obvious teaching contained in the flow of these Gospel selections.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

What could that possibly mean?

There’s no “fat” in the Gospels. There’s nothing in there that was put in by accident. No book could contain all the words and actions Christ performed while He was among us; every word that has been recorded, has been recorded for our benefit, because it’s something we need to know. We need to know that this was the first thing Christ said, when they dislocated His shoulders and forced filthy, rusty nails through His wrists.

Angelus: Francis' heartfelt appeal for Eastern Goutha, “You cannot fight evil with another evil, let there be access to humanitarian aid and let the wounded and sick be evacuated"

If you read letters to the editor in newspapers you will realize that many people have lost confidence in a loving God. Nowhere is this more forcefully indicated than in the debate over abortion and assisted suicide. Some have gone so far as to assert the Catholic Church wants people to suffer, that it’s a death dealing rather than a life-giving institution, and that it extols human pain and suffering.

The Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan lives in prison with unshakable faith which also supports her family. Her husband and one of her daughters are in Rome.

Have you ever heard of such praise? In praise of thirst? This week, Pope Francis along with the entire Vatican prelates went to Casa Santa Marta for a week of spiritual exercises as has been the case on the first week of the Lenten season. But, since the election of Pope Francis, the spiritual exercises have been held outside the Vatican and not within it as has been the case for several years.

Billy Graham, the man symbol of the Evangelicals in the United States, is gone. He was a great admirer of John Paul II and helped to ease relations with the Catholics.

As eighteenth century English writer Samuel Johnson might have put it, “Nothing concentrates the mind like knowing that I am dust, and to dust I shall return.” And nothing is a more bracing reminder of that reality than the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. Placed on the forehead in the form of the cross, the ashes symbolize the Great Paradox: to live, I must die.

Following is a reflection of Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, titled, ‘Ash Wednesday: Beginning Our Lenten Pilgrimage':

During Lent and the celebrations of the Eucharist Year, Christians in the “Land of the Pure” remember their martyrs, as their endure their struggles with faith.

On the streets of Youhanabad, a Christian neighborhood in Lahore, in the southern part of Pakistan’s Punjab capital, children play on dirt roads amid busy small businesses. There seems to be no trace left of the fear or tension that three years ago besieged the local faithful, after the suicide bombings that simultaneously struck the two Christian churches in the neighborhood, one Catholic, the other Protestant.