Lent – a journey to the inner self

Take a look around: Ripples of a global financial turmoil and economic instability, debt-ridden countries, waging of civil wars, uprising of oppressed people against authoritarian regimes, crime, dysfunctional families, children entangled in marital quarrels tossed around like casino chips on a roulette table, debates on divorce, who knows, perhaps tomorrow on abortion or euthanasia, single mothers, some paying the price of an unbridled impulse of passion, others victims of abuse on their dignity, others deliberately taking up the latest trend.

Shall we complacently remain unmoved in the midst of this chaos? Does it have to be an earthquake or a tsunami to grip our attention and bring us to a spiritual awakening? Better still, where do we stand in all of this?

There is no better way to find out during Lent but to journey to the inner self, to the desert where the complexity of civilisation vanishes as if it had never existed, where we leave the petty avarice of the cities behind into this place where the scorching sun and the night frost is revealed. It is the sole place where we can think outside the box. We wilfully abandon this chaos of hectic life into a pilgrimage to let the Divine Master redefine our inner self. Nothing between heaven and earth but bareness and a soul in search of the beyond.

“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). In the desert, we experience the oneness with the mystery of the Divine.

In the midst of nothing we experience fullness. In the midst of a naked world we feel enriched, not with the fake riches known to the world, where moth and rust obliterate to dust, but with wisdom and understanding.

In the midst of aridity we drink from the fountain of life. And as we quench our thirst with the waters of everlasting life, we come to apprehend the root of the chaos out there. We come to an understanding that mankind thought it can make a better world without God. Mankind, this tiny existence in the midst of an endless desert, had to have it its way, to play God and devise strategies far from the gospel principles that bring nothing but boredom and gloom. We deliberately refuse to let God be God, we reject God’s merciful plan to save the world through his most beloved Son. As we draw closer to the spiritual warfare we realise what St Paul meant when he proclaimed, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12)

In the desert, in our place of solitude, we beg God to reveal to us our own misery and how we too are accomplices to a fallen world by that which we have done or by that which we have failed to do…by what we have said and by what we have failed to say, by that we have loved and by that we have failed to love, by our quick judgments and sluggish forgiveness.

May this blessed time of Lent reach the very inner core of our being, may the dear Lord speak to us in intimacy of our hearts and lead us to repentance.

For, dear Lord “You have not come to condemn us sinners, but for us sinners to repent and have life, life to the full in the Resurrected Christ.”