Lent, the preeminent season of spiritual renewal, is a gift and an opportunity every year...; as the days pass, it comes to us as a sign of the Father's faithful love. Always ready to welcome us into his home, he offers us continual opportunities to return to him, come back to ourselves, resume our journey of conversion, savor the sweetness of his Word, and give deep meaning to every moment.
To experience this Lent in a renewed way, we could begin reading - every day - a few verses about the Passion of Jesus: each evangelist presents it with different details, and in every account we can find food for thought and meditation. 

Why read the account of the Passion?

Because in that account we have the opportunity to rediscover everything about ourselves and everything about God. On that night, the Master gave us his last, most important “lesson” - before the resurrection - about love and what it means to “love.”
Walking through the forty days that separate us from Easter in the company of the One who placed himself in human hands and faced the night, pain, abandonment, darkness, betrayal, incomprehension, anguish, turmoil, hardship... death, will strengthen us inwardly by reminding us that in the night, in pain, in abandonment, in darkness, in betrayal, in incomprehension, in anguish, in turmoil, in hardship... in death, we are never alone!
As we discover the “secrets” of that night of passion, that night of love, Father Bruno Tarantino invites us to identify with the co-protagonists who lived through it: John, Simon Peter, Judas Iscariot, Caiaphas, Pilate, Barabbas, the women who follow the Son along Calvary, Mary, the centurion, the two thieves... These men and women also lived through their “night of passion”; eyewitnesses to a God put to death by human hands, they had to come to “terms” with themselves: with fear, despair, infidelity, weakness, disappointment, repentance...

Each of us has already lived through who knows how many “nights of passion,” and perhaps this Lent finds us “in the night” itself; well then, far from judging one another - there is only one Judge - let us prepare to walk the journey toward Easter of the Resurrection, remaining close to Jesus who sweats blood in Gethsemane, is handed over to the guards by Judas Iscariot, betrayed by Simon Peter, abandoned by the disciples, “judged” by Pilate, accompanied by Mary all the way to the foot of the cross... and let us live every moment with him, certain that nothing is lost in the eyes of the Father and that every heartbeat finds meaning in the sacrifice of the Son.

Although we often feel alone “in the night,” may this Lent be the right opportunity to grow in faith and experience that, since Jesus went through and overcame his night of passion, we are not and never will be alone!