Empty Promises

On Sunday at mass, Father Sam treated the sign of peace (a usual part of the Catholic mass between the Lord's Prayer and the distribution of the Eucharist) in the way he typically does during Lent.  We had a chance to great the priest with peace (under the new responses, the priest says, "Peace be with you," and the congregation returns, "And with your spirit.") but he asked us to simply search our hearts rather than to offer each other peace.  Father Sam will ask us to offer each other peace again starting on Easter Sunday.

What was interesting was the way he cast it.  He pointed out that the sign of peace is sometimes called the kiss of peace.  Just after having read the story of the passion of Christ, where Judas gave Jesus a kiss as a sign of who should be arrested.  Father Sam commented that, of all Sundays, Palm Sunday is the one on which the kiss of peace has such a diametrically meaning to what we think of in the mass setting.

What he asked us to consider was weather our promises of peace (or promises and commitments in general, in my opinion) were as empty as Judas's kiss of peace in the story of the betrayal of Jesus.

Being "all in," a recurrent theme for me during this Lenten season, would mean minimizing the number of empty promises I make and follow through on the greatest number of promises/commitments.  And, of course, in the long run simply stop making promises that I can't keep.