Today’s readings: Genesis 2, 7-9; 3, 1-7; Romans 5, 12-19; Matt. 4, 1-11.

The Scriptures today evoke the understanding of life as a spiritual struggle. Even if the notion may sound outdated, we are all called to be honest enough to admit that there are habits, passions and inclinations that we need to confront and resist.

In the pre-Christian era, Aristotle had already considered passions as neither virtues nor vices, neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. In the history of Christian spirituality, alongside a negative view of passions, there is also a more optimistic assessment. In our times, heavily secularised and alienated from the Church, we would do better to speak of educating the passions rather than of eradicating them.

Genesis reveals a profound truth about what we all go through in life. Very often, things do not turn out the way we expect, and we experience deep disconnection with ourselves, with the world around us, and with God. It is the estrangement Adam and Eve felt and which destroyed the original harmony they enjoyed.

When the feeling of estrangement takes over, everything becomes more fragile and we become more vulnerable. The world ceases to be a home and becomes a foreign land, a land of exile where we no longer belong. There is too much that threatens the “breath of life” which, as Genesis puts it, God breathed into us all so that we may have life.

Threats come both from outside and from the inside. What Lent highlights throughout this journey towards Easter are the three basic truths that threats are real, that we are vulnerable in our humanity, and that God can restore new life where it goes missing. If life is normally envisaged as a journey towards death, the spiritual life is envisaged as a journey from death to life.

Lent compresses the long journey with its weariness, distractions and temptations. But it is meant to keep us focused on an outcome beyond our expectations and reach. To see this outcome and to grasp the deeper meaning of life in the light of the Jesus story, we need to stop and enter into waiting mode. During this time we are invited to strip ourselves from false assurances which are misleading in life and about its meaning.

It is only in God that we can see the entire picture of our existence. This is not a dependence on God that denies our freedom, as despisers of religion claim. We can only own our selves if we are able to stand in examination of our lives, measuring how distant we may be from the source that gives life, while longing to achieve and possess not the true home but our self-constructed spaces.

Orthodox Christian writers often say: “True repentance begins with the acknowledgement of self-impos­ed exile”. In Eternal Echoes, John O’Donohue writes of “prisons we choose to live in”. He expresses this masterfully: “A house can become a little self-enclosed world. Sheltered there, we learn to forget the wild, magnificent universe in which we live. When we domesticate our minds and hearts, we reduce our lives.”

This is what Lent is for: not to let us domesticate our minds and hearts which were made instead to soar high up and aspire. That is what we are made for. But that is not how factually we live. We tend to resign ourselves too easily to what we exchange for truth but which eventually turns out to be only what John Henry Newman, in his book Lead Kindly Light, calls “the encircling gloom”.

Beyond the gloom, Newman awaits “the distant scene”. Our call is to contemplate this distant scene and to strive to possess it. Contemplation and inward silence, much to be longed for during Lent, can restore sense and meaning to the hassle that engulfs daily living. It requires effort, struggle, and persistent exertion to fight resolutely against deep-rooted habits and inclinations that give us only a partial taste of what life is.

Kallistos Ware, an English bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, writes that the wise man should aim not at the total suppression of the passions in any part of the soul, but at their maintenance in proper balance and harmony. As Lent unfolds, this is the pathway indicated by God’s Word for us facilitating the inward journey and our reconnection with God.

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