Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ immediately reveals to us how often we try to “live by bread alone.” We trust in the status quo that maximizes profit at the expense of the poor and the earth, and we rarely (if ever!) imagine and act on a new way of being.

Francis exhorts us to “replace consumption with sacrifice, greed with generosity, wastefulness with a spirit of sharing, an asceticism which ‘…is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs.’” (9) If our God has a rule, it is to love like this. This Lent, let us slow down and live “by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”

—Paul Mitchell, author of The Examen Book