Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This is my seventh year as your Bishop. This is the seventh time I have prepared with you for Lent, beginning this coming Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and abstinence.

One of the temptations, with which I have wrestled during these past seven years, has been the temptation to disconnect from the living community of the parish. After thirty seven years loving and serving different parish communities as a priest, I suddenly found myself belonging to every parish in our Diocese of Northampton and yet experiencing none in a personal and profound way.

Just as I struggle not to disconnect, so each of you has to make a conscious effort to be a living part of the Church in your parish. Your active presence and your response to God’s grace here make the parish alive.

Our parishes are not like convenience stores available just to meet our own needs. In the parish we are formed by God’s Word and his Sacraments. We praise and thank God for his gifts. We support each other in following Jesus. We help one another in times of need and sadness. We celebrate together. The parish is a springboard for service to the wider community at home and abroad.

My prayer for us all is that during Lent we may grow in the life given to us at our Baptism and strengthen the bonds of belonging to the Church in our parishes. In our busy lives,

Lent is a time for sacrifices in union with our Saviour, Jesus Christ. We can begin with the gift of our time, time to reflect and pray, and time to review our connections with God and with those around us, especially our families. It is a time, too, for penance and self-denial to counter sin and all that disconnects us from God and from one another.

Earlier this month I was in Peru visiting communities and projects supported by what you give to CAFOD. I met a group of women living in desperate conditions, in shacks on a barren hillside with no running water - but they were flourishing! Why? Because with the help of CAFOD they had come together to help and support each other with so many practical, emotional and spiritual issues. They had connected and were growing in confidence and self-esteem.

It is not the latest gadget or the new fashion item that will make us happy. It is our connections with one another and with God. May this Lent be a time for you and me to grow in the company of those preparing to be baptised and received into the Church at Easter.

With God’s grace, may we disconnect from sin in the Sacrament of Penance. May we be generous with our time, our talent and our treasure. May we help one another like the men in today’s Gospel who brought the paralytic to Jesus. May prayer and self-denial enable us to flourish, to be true sisters and brothers of Jesus whom we praise and adore.  For, by his holy cross, he has redeemed the world.

With every blessing,

Peter, Bishop of Northampton