Bishop Mario Grech’s pastoral letter for Lent urges Gozitans to return to the Father in Heaven.

Mgr Grech starts his reflections by speaking about a father who told him that just as Archbishop Cremona was being installed as bishop, he was at his dying son’s bedside.

This leads him on to the Gospel parable of the prodigal son who returns to the Father. “Lent is a good time to return to the Father, to let the Father shower us with his love and forgiveness and re-establish his relationship with us,” Bishop Grech says.

What worries him, he argues pointedly, is the attitude of the elder son in the parable: the son who did nothing wrong but who needed, just as much as his younger brother, to return to the Father.

The elder son had no loving relationship, neither with his father nor with his brother. “Those who in the church are happy with the knowledge they have of God and are not interested in getting to know him further resemble the elder brother, those who have compromised their lives; those who treat God like a marketplace – give me and I will give you; those who are more intent on observing the law than in growing their filial relationship with the Father; those who are niggardly with the time they spend in prayer or in giving of themselves to others; those who are not open to God’s surprises; those who would exclude others from the House of God; those who want the Church to be their own house and are always ready to point fingers at others,” Bishop Grech wrote.

On the other hand, there is something of the younger son in each one of us: the yearning for freedom, for adventure, for autonomy. The younger son’s mistake was in moving so far away from his father as this allowed his human wishes to get the better of his human dignity. Bishop Grech compares this human desire for freedom to contemporary ideas regarding marriage and the family: these ideas show how they have distanced themselves away from the Father and how such ideas may lead to death, just as happened with the younger son.