Today’s readings: Deuteronomy 26, 4-10; Romans 10, 8-13; Luke 4, 1-13.
We all have giants in life that make us feel Lilliputian, that make us vulnerable and breathless. They may be of different sorts and forms, ranging from financial burdens that can’t be respected to habits that can’t be broken, or to past failures hard to forget and forgive. Many times we don’t feel equipped spiritually and morally to face these giants. Lent can be the right time to at least name them.
It can be the time we badly need to provide us with an opportunity to stop the world around us. We need to stop, we all need to enter our deserts one time or other. There is a big difference between entering freely and wilfully one’s own desert because one feels the need, and being taken unawares and suddenly finding oneself a desert wanderer.
“Jesus left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit through the wilderness.” This is the key statement in today’s gospel that leads us all in the spirit of Lent. In the wilderness Jesus was hungry, and there he was tested on his wholehearted commitment. When hungry, lonely and suffering we are tested on the levels of our trust and internal stability.
The ashes that kick-start the Lenten journey, rather than reminding us of death, should make more present to us that we are called to rise from the ashes of our weakness and failures, of our vulnerability and lack of faith. This reminds me of the documentary feature film Rising from Ashes, and dealing with two worlds colliding when cycling legend Jock Boyer moves to Rwanda to help a group of struggling genocide survivors pursue their dream of a national team. That was what made them find new purpose as they rose from the ashes of their past.
In like manner, the ashes on our head in Lent are meant every year to make us tell the story of our possible redemption, hope, and second or third chances. The gospel takes us in the wilderness to be alone, like Jesus was. At this time of year, it is individually that we are called to face life and its hurdles. This is not the time to shift our talk, as we very often tend to do, on the cultural and collective level of our society or what the world is going through right now. That is also important.
But we can’t think in terms of the collective when dealing in depth with existential and very personal issues. The kingdom of God comes only insofar as it comes into individuals. As author Ruth Burrows writes in exploring St Teresa’s Interior Castle, before the kingdoms of this world are overthrown, the old world in us must have been overthrown.
The satanic temptations in our life deserts are the temptations of modern-day messianism, of ego-trips we embark on, of overnight successes we dream of, of easy money we acquire through forms of corruption that promise us instant havens. These are all glittering gold that distorts us from keeping the faith in the true God of life and instead give us the feel-good sensation of becoming instantly small gods.
These are the temptations we face daily when we put the meaning of our existence in what gratifies the body and generates only tragic delusions. These are the conflicts we all carry inside us. They are the daily crossroads where we are called to choose between trusting God or simply ignoring the giants within us and believing that at the end of the day we can cope on our own.
The first reading from Deuteronomy gives the first and basic profession of faith of the Israelites. It was not a confession of principles or tenets of belief. It is a faith that takes the shape of an existential acknowledgment of who they were, what they suffered and endured, and how God intervened to make them survive all life’s travails and slavery.
Deserts can be liberating. But deserts weigh down on us when we pretend to be without fear, when we convince ourselves that we can proceed business-as-usual, ignoring the turmoils within. When all is said and explored with regard to life as we live it nowadays, there is one and the same thread that links us to the Israelites in the desert, to Jesus, to the early Christians and to the great mystics: the remedy lies in deep union with God. This is what Lent is about, or what it should be about.