Today’s readings: Genesis 9, 8-15; 1 Peter 3, 18-22; Mark 1, 12-15.
We always thought God is a mystery, and from catechism lessons to theology classes that was the constant teaching we received. But is it true, strictly speaking? God is not a mystery in the sense that He is beyond our reach, because we are intellectually deficient to grasp who He is. God is a mystery because we are in the first place a mystery to ourselves.
The problem is that the more we become estranged to ourselves and to the biosphere we inhabit, the more God becomes estranged to us, and consequently out of our reach. Perhaps this is the major difficulty we experience today in our talk about God. Because of our dualism, because we separate too much what we need to unite, namely God and our being human, our proclamation of God is becoming less and less convincing and credible.
The vast interior landscape of the heart, the mystery we are to ourselves, invites us to stillness. This is the challenge Lent personally presents us with. St Mark’s Jesus is driven out into the wilderness by the spirit. It was not the need to rest or relax, to restore himself or to find some quiet time that Jesus went out into the wilderness. It was the spirit who took him out there.
It is the same spirit who invites us to let ourselves be driven into what for us today can be the wilderness to meet our own self for who we are, for whatever we carry in the depths of our hearts. Maggie Ross, in her book Writing the Icon of the Heart, writes: “As the pace of contemporary life accelerates and the rising tide of noise degrades the biosphere, the need to recover and, more especially, to practise silence and seek into the beholding becomes ever more critical. This is especially true for institutional religion.”
Institutional religion, particularly for our culture, where all that is religious seems to be the opposite of stillness and beholding, today poses serious problems to true and authentic faith. This may at first sound paradoxical. But things as they are with us, the Lenten season, year in year out, makes us enter not into the wilderness where we can meet up with ourselves, but into more distractions that make faith rest more on outer religious expression and less on the inner landscapes where we can seek to make more sense of our normal human experience.
The Lenten wilderness, translated in our times in terms of weekend retreats or days of recollection, is not fleeing from time, nor is it about acquiring spiritual experiences. It is about being open to reality, it is about making sense of daily experience and integrate it into our knowledge of God. This is after all what the temptation Jesus encountered in the wilderness stands for. Our human experience can easily be seen as blocking our access to God. Yet, depending on how we struggle to connect with our true selves, it can also serve to unblock that access.
From Genesis in the first reading we read about God’s covenant with Noah. God did not promise to eliminate the waters of the flood but to turn that water, as we read from St Peter in the second reading, in the “type of baptism which saves you now”. It is through our humanity, even if vulnerable, fragile, and sinful, that we journey towards God and that God reaches out to us.
It is unfortunate that we continue to interpret Jesus’s words, “Repent, and believe the good news”, in an arcane language of the interior life. The way we preach sounds many a time disincarnating. It’s high time we stop preaching conversion as if magic is involved, as if we can be transformed or changed into ‘spiritual beings’. Gospel spirituality is about being transfigured. In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear; they are glorified.
This is what we as believers are challenged today to project in a language and in concepts that address believers and non-believers alike. God’s covenant is about the reconciliation of humanity and the entire creation. This cannot be transmitted in religious cliches which every Lent we dish out as part of a culture but which in truth fails to address the real daily needs and challenges that weigh down on our humanity in need of redemption.