During Lent we are invited to go into the desert. Most people have no desire to go through the desert. At a spiritual level though we are called to love the desert, because it is in the desert that we come to a greater understanding of the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder all the fruits of what Jesus experienced and learned. The Lord is not calling us physically, but he is calling us spiritually to a state of the desert. He’s calling us to remove distractions from our lives, like the television, the computer, the radio, newspaper, and all the other various things that distract us from God. These things maybe fine in themselves but they crowd our lives from with noise so that we can't hear God, and crowd it with clutter so that we can't see God. In a book I recently read called “The Power Of Silence” by Cardinal Robert Sarah, he says that it is in the silence that we find God. That we meet God, but sadly our culture is addicted to noise and we are uncomfortable with silence. The first temptation we face is to drown out God with the noise, and to refuse to go to the desert with Christ, to think that our lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up chocolate and potato chips. The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ's voice from the desert, and he says to each one of us today, "Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest for a while” (Mk 6:31) . Jesus has something to say to you in the classroom of silence. And the fruit of that time in the desert is where we will meet God, who will drive us to change the direction of our lives. We received ashes on Wednesday this past week, and we were told to “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” To repent comes from the Greek word, “Metanoia” which simply means to turn around and change direction. Metanoia calls us to revolutionize the way we look at things, at the world, at ourselves, and at others, so that we might put on the way Christ looks at things. Repent means to turn one's thoughts upside down, or better yet to turn things right side up. It's as if we've been going in one direction and Jesus tells us, “stop! turn around go in the opposite direction.”