Lent spans the month, engaging us with themes of repentance and reconciliation. This Women’s History Month, we might consider women who called others to examine their lives: saints like Mother Katharine Drexel (3), Perpetua and Felicity (7), and Frances of Rome (9).

The first reading this week offers a meditation on the origin of sin. The writer doesn’t so much explain why sin came into the world as tell a story about its entry. The disobedience of Adam and Eve grows out of their breaking trust in God.

When we read about them in Holy Writ, conversations with the devil seem eerie, dramatic, and singular. Consider Eve, standing naked at the tree, while the serpent insinuates itself around her heart with whispered words of unimagined greatness.

Next Jesus was taken into the wild by the Spirit for the Test. The Devil was ready to give it. Jesus prepared for the Test by fasting forty days and forty nights.

Only fourth-grade boys in 1958 could conceive such a scheme to prove their toughness to each other. One at a time, we were supposed to go into Berger’s Drugstore and steal some candy, the type of which was determined by picking out of a hat. 

"If you’re so tough," the kid from across the alley taunted," why don’t you jump off the roof?” My buddy and I had climbed up on my garage roof and felt like we were pretty cool up there.

A friend tells this story about the first apartment he rented after leaving the college seminary. His downstairs neighbor, for reasons never determined, was militantly anti-Catholic.

Sisters and brothers, we have begun our Lenten journey of repentance and return to God. Let us accept God's gracious gift of salvation and life.

Both at the beginning of creation, and at the beginning of the recreation, temptation was the first event.