There is only one season in the Church calendar in which we are so clear about our lives being a journey, and this is it—Lent. For 40 days we walk toward Jerusalem with Jesus, through the ups and downs of his life as he meets social outcasts, antagonistic religious figures, people who are sick, crowds of onlookers, and his own puzzled disciples. And as we walk with him, his life and his experiences highlight our own. The people he meets are like us in so many ways. Some are humble. Some are arrogant. Some are greedy. Many are ill, physically, mentally, spiritually. He engages them all and sets an example for us to follow. In Lent we take stock of our readiness. We assess what holds us back, examine the attitudes we bring to our challenges, and face the flaws of character that lead us toward self-centered behaviors. It is a particularly difficult season if we forget we are loved and that our one and only job on this journey is to become better and better at loving others as well as ourselves. Loving ourselves is its own challenge since satisfying the desire for comfort, pleasure, and a sense of our own power can seem like love. Sometimes it is and sometimes it falls into the category of self-indulgence. Sometimes it disintegrates into addictive patterns. There are fine lines here that require awareness in order to tease them apart. What is healthy for us builds up the family and the community. What is unhealthy for us is also unhealthy, even oppressive, to those around us. Love is an open path asking the ever-present question—who will this choice serve? Does this behavior, this attitude, this thought-process serve the greater good of everyone or does it serve only myself?
Jesus’ profound experience of God’s love for him launched him on his adult journey. The words “You are my beloved son,” proclaimed at his baptism must have anchored not only his sense of self, but also a profound awareness of God’s presence in his life. It stayed with him in the wilderness as he wrestled with the inner darkness and temptations born of hunger and desire. It stayed with him as he struggled with the forces of danger, the desire for comfort and safety and his very human drive to take charge of the situation, exercise control and satisfy some of his basic needs. Hunger and desire on many levels motivate our actions from moment to moment throughout the day. Hunger for food is the first hunger we know, but hunger for attention, for love, for companionship, for safety and security, for recognition, for pleasure, for meaning—the list could go on—are all driving forces in our lives. And each of these hungers can lead to excess. Each human need comes with a built-in temptation toward personal gratification at another’s’ expense. Lent offers a corrective pause in our spiritual journey, asking us to reflect on the attitudes and behaviors we’ve adopted that divert our attention from genuine care and concern for the basic needs of others and ourselves.
Throughout Jesus’ life, his experience of God’s love and continuing presence stayed with him. It stayed with him through all the disappointments, rejections and set-backs he suffered on the way to his final destination. We are invited not only to hear his story, but to practice his way of coping with fear, sadness, discouragement, anger and anxiety. What he did was pray. Richard Rohr writes that “Prayer is not a transaction that somehow pleases God but a transformation of the consciousness of the one doing the praying. Prayer is not changing God’s mind about us or about anything else, but allowing God to change our mind about the reality right in front of us (which we usually avoid or distort). [Rohr’s Daily Meditation, Dec. 22, 2017]
Paul asks “What does Scripture say?—that God’s Spirit is on your lips and in your heart.” Prayer is opening your heart and mind to the Spirit that resides within you so that loving-kindness, compassion and empathy can grow stronger every day. Prayer helps us remember we are embedded in God, filled with God’s Spirit, surrounded and upheld by God’s love. It helps us remember we, too, are God’s beloved daughters and sons, God’s pleasure and delight. Remembering this—reminding ourselves of this truth each day during Lent—will allow us to look at the mistakes we’ve made, the direction we’ve taken in our thoughts and actions that need adjusting, the attitudes and patterns of thinking that run counter to our own values and spiritual aspirations. Remembering we are cherished—that all of us and all of creation is cherished—can encourage us to forgive others and ourselves when we fall short of our intention to be respectful, honest, open, accepting, and present.
The journey toward Jerusalem is filled with obstacles to love, for it is in meeting these challenges that we grow in our ability to love despite the unloving behaviors around us. The question before us, says Rabbi Shapiro, is this: will we “engage this moment with kindness or with cruelty, with love or with fear, with generosity or scarcity, with a joyous heart or an embittered one?…If you choose kindness, love, generosity, and joy,” he says, “you will discover in that choice the Kingdom of God….If you choose cruelty, fear, scarcity, and bitterness, then you will discover in that choice the hellish states of which so many religions speak” [The Sacred Light of Lovingkindness Preparing to Practice (SkyLight Paths Publishing: 2006, xi-xii)]
Lent invites us to become more conscious of the journey we are on, more aware of our inner lives, and the choices we make and why. We follow the Lenten path by first making time for prayer and allowing God to change our mind and heart, change how we see ourselves, others and the world around us. The job is to become better at loving—God, neighbor and self in these 40 days ahead. As we enter the journey, may our compassion grow this season bring us to the birth place of Easter joy.
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