One day, a father brought his son to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen for advice. The boy was conceited, a young lawbreaker, who had given up living by faith, was angry with himself, and very bitter toward other people in the world. Following the meeting, the son ran away for a year; he returned home just as rebellious and reckless as before. The father asked the archbishop, “What should I do with my son?” Archbishop Sheen advised sending the son to a school outside of the United States. The father followed the archbishop’s counsel.

About a year later the young man returned home. He met with Archbishop Sheen, and made this request: “Would you support me in an enterprise I have undertaken recently in Mexico? There is a group of young men in the college where I study, who have built a little school. With them, I have gone around the neighborhood and brought children into the school to teach them the Catechism. Also, we have brought in a doctor from the United States, for one month, to take care of the sick people in the neighborhood.” The archbishop was stunned by the young man’s information and his transformation. Then, he inquired what had happened. The boy responded, “I discovered my neighbor.” In other words, through his neighbor’s need, the boy learned to love. This response is a far cry from the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, who said, “My neighbor is hell.”

Every person acts according to one of these two principles: he lives for his neighbor, or he lives for himself.

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, gave a Lenten message for this liturgical year: “Look at Christ pierced on the cross.” When we look at Christ on the cross, we discover the true meaning of love: self-sacrifice. Christ himself taught, “No greater love has a man than to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13).

Indeed, when St. John describes the lance that pierced deeply into our Lord’s heart, he reports, “Immediately blood and water flowed out” (Jn 19:34). This report impresses upon each one of us the free and limitless gift of Christ’s love, a gift that is given without reservation, qualification or recompense.

The pope goes on to instruct us that, “(Christ) is the un-surpassing revelation of God’s love. …On the cross, it is God himself who begs the love of his creatures.” Until Christ’s birth, the human person had wandered about with only a capacity to love and to be loved; yet, he or she did not know how to love truly. Due to sin, human love became distorted and self-serving. Separated from God, for the many, the human person chooses the second principle: the neighbor is an obstacle to my self-fulfillment.

The love we are created to give cannot begin with ourselves; as human beings, we cannot generate within our hearts sacrificial love for another person. That kind of love must flow into our hearts from Jesus Christ. St. John tells us, “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (Jn 4:19). Christ alone gives us the power to love. He does so by our participation in the eucharistic sacrifice, which is called the sacred liturgy. We are reminded of the merciful love of Jesus Christ on the cross every time we participate in the sacred liturgy. The liturgy is the act of sacrificial love when Christ allows himself to be broken and given as a gift. The Lenten message of Pope Benedict teaches that, “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation … we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving.”

Our primary focus during Lent, then, should not be on prayer, fasting or almsgiving. These are the means that dispose us for the primary Lenten focus. The primary focus should be on the sacrificial love of the crucified Christ and the self-giving eucharistic Christ, two entities of love, which can never be separated. That integrated, Christ opens for us what our Holy Father calls, “a renewed experience of God’s love that we can then give to others.”

May this year’s Lenten journey renew us as lovers of God first, through a love for the Crucifixion and the Eucharist that we will go forward to love our neighbor’s actual needs: emotionally, spiritually or physically.