Today’s GA text, translated by Teresa Benedetta

In placing ashes on the head of the faithful, the celebrant says: “Remember that you are dust and, to dust you will return” (cfr Gen 3,19), or repeats Jesus’s exhortation: “Repent and believe in the Gospel” (cfr Mk 1,15).
Both formulas are reminders of the truth of human existence: we are creatures with limitations, sinners who always need penance and conversion.
How important it is to listen and welcome this reminder in our time! when contemporary man proclaims his autonomy from God, he becomes a slave of himself and often finds himself in a state of disconsolate solitude.
The invitation to penitence is therefore a stimulus to return to the arms of God, kind and merciful Father, to trust in him, to entrust ourselves to him as adoptive children, regenerated by his love.
With wise teaching, the Church repeats that penitence is above all a grace, a gift which opens the heart to the infinite goodness of God. He himself, through this grace, anticipates our desire for penitence and accompanies our efforts towards full adherence to his saving will. To repent means to allow oneself to be conquered by Jesus (cfr Phil 3,12), and with him, to ‘return’ to the Father.
Penitence therefore entails placing oneself humbly in the school of jesus, and walk obediently in his footsteps. In this respect, the words which he himself indicated as the conditions for being his true disciples are indeed illuminating: “He who wishes to save his own life will lose it; but he who loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel, will save it” (Mk 8,35-36).
Do the conquest of success, the yearning for prestige and the search for comfort – when these totally absorb life to the point of excluding God from the horizon – truly lead to happiness? Can there be authentic happiness in doing without God?
Experience shows that one is not made happy only because expectations and material demands are satisfied. In reality, the only joy which can fill the human heart is that which comes from God: and indeed, we need this infinite joy. Neither daily concerns nor the difficulties of life can extinguish the joy that comes from friendship with God.
Jesus’s invitation to take up our own Cross and follow him may seem initially severe and contrary to what we wish, mortifying to our desire for personal fulfillment. But looking at it more closely, we see that is not so: the testimony of the saints shows that in the Cross of Christ, in the love he gives us, renouncing our self-possession, we find that profound serenity which is the spring for generous dedication to our brothers, especially to the poor and the needy. This makes us joyous ourselves.
The Lenten journey of penitence, which we undertake with the whole Church today, is therefore the propitious occasion, ‘the favorable moment’ (cfr 2Cor 6,2) to renew our filial abandonment into the hands of God and to put into practice what Jesus continues to remind us: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mk 8,34), going forward on the road of love and true happiness.
In the Lenten season, the Church, echoing the Gospel, proposes some specific tasks for the faithful during this itinerary of interior renewal: prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
In my Lenten Message for this year, published recently, I dwelt on “the practice of almsgiving, which represents a concrete way of coming to the aid of the needy and is, at the same time, an ascetic exercise to free oneself from attachment to earthly goods” (No. 1). Unfortunately, we know that the temptation of material wealth profoundly pervades modern society.

(Click on the image below for the Vatican Lent page. Not on the individual links from here – they won’t work. Just on the image itself.)