Throughout the Lenten season, we will post reflections for holy days and Sundays from this year’s Lenten reflection booklet, Peace compels us, which includes all-new reflections written by Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv., Pax Christi USA’s bishop president, and Michael Angel Martin, coordinator of Pax Christi Florida, and classic reflections from past booklets, like the one below written by Sheila Cassidy in 1993.
Click here to see all reflections as they are posted as well as links to other Lenten resources on our Lent 2023 webpage.
If you are looking for a daily reflection booklet specially curated for Lent, you can still purchase and download this year’s e-booklet, Peace compels us: Reflections for Lent 2026.
REFLECTION FOR Sunday, February 22, 2026
by Sheila Cassidy
Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11
In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 2:9
I’ve decided lately that I’m a spiritual eclectic.
In my garden of Eden, there will be wonderful plain chant sung by Benedictines but the spiritual counsel will be done by wise, down-to-earth Ignatian men and women who understand about praying without images as well as in pictures.
Time was when I was too proud to even try imaginative contemplation but then a canny Scots Jesuit suggested that if I couldn’t imagine a scene from scripture perhaps I could draw it. My whoopee was deafening as I’m a great doodler and in no time I was contemplating my 20th century paradise and the nature of the fall.
My first picture was of the library in a beautiful holiday home. Adam and Eve were sprawled about on Persian rugs drinking coffee and reading all sorts of fascinating books. Every now and then, however, they glanced up at a book on the top shelf — the manual of the knowledge of good and evil that God had told them was out of bounds. Eventually curiosity overcame them and they took it down.
What was in that book, I wonder? Was it the secret to the atom bomb or a recipe for nerve gas? Was it a book … which described how we might have power over others?
Who knows — perhaps it doesn’t matter. What we learn from the story is that God weeps when we abuse our gifts. Our beauty, our wit, our strength are for the cherishing of our world and each other and if we misuse them we destroy not only our enemies but ourselves as well.
God of the good green earth,
forgive us our trespasses,
our pollution and our greed,
teach us to be stewards of your gifts
so that we may return
with clean hands to your house.
Join the Pax Christi USA community on Monday, February 23, for the first of our weekly series of Lenten prayer services over Zoom. Click here for more information and to register.
>> Click here to see more resources for prayer, study and action this Lenten season.
Sheila Cassidy is an English doctor who has written several books on spirituality and about her experience as a torture survivor in Chile in 1975. She wrote the 1993 Pax Christi USA Lenten reflection booklet, Lent: A mapless journey.