Pulse 94.1 Fm

Gospel Reflection–Sr Katherine Stone MGL–Wilderness and Wild Beasts (Sr Katherine Stone says that the 40 days of Lent can seem like a long, bleak stretch of time. It makes us wonder why the Spirit would take Jesus out to spend 40 days in the wilderness. The wilderness (or desert) has traditionally been a place of encounter with God. For millennia, men and women of prayer have taken themselves into the desert to be rid of all distraction and encounter the living God. Each Lent, we, too, follow the Holy Spirit into our own experience of “wilderness”. However, in the wilderness we’re prey to temptation, which is ultimately trying to get us to settle for less than what we had set out for. While in the wilderness, like Jesus, we too discover the wild beasts. They’re living in us all of the time, but they tend to behave in a more civilized manner when we feed them with regular coffee and take the edge off their appetites with alcohol or Netflix. But without those distractions, we see more of our inner wild beasts i