Lenten Meditation - Fasting (2)

 ‘When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting-place, but it finds none. Then it says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” When it comes, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first."

Amongst the sayings of Jesus , this one has always intrigued me - in part because it can be understood in so many ways. [Like all of Jesus' stories it is Universal, and thus meaning is continually opening up in it. We must beware of the Closure that says "this means . . .". Rather as we are open to the Spirit, it is perhaps better to say "God seems to be saying This to me through this story at present . . ."]

Amongst the sayings of the Wise there is one which seems apposite to this subject of fasting and especially, if you have been reading this series, my avoidance of the subject of Prayer. In the Philokalia we read that to fast with out praying is the work of the devil. In part this is because it is to see the Disciplines as Ends in themselves. It is to substitute our Spiritual Fortitude for the very Life of God. So we fastidiously Clean out our house by fasting - we ward off our sins by almsgiving, we deal with our Sloth by rigorous studies, we deal with pride by Finding some Lowly service, but we do not Pray. So there is nothing to replace what we have cleaned out, which leaves plenty of space for other spirits.

We are so determined to make ourselves better, to make ourselves Good - that we reject the Life of the Healer, the One who is Good. We clear out the house so it is fit for Our idea of the Perfect guest - but we do not come to prayer. To allow Him to reside there and now all we have is the Pride of our spiritual accomplishment, which is the Worst kind, for it most readily counterfeits Life in our understanding (although in reality there is No point of correspondence)

But of course, Our idea of the Perfect guest is of course Ourselves and of course the presence of Our Spiritual accomplishments is far more amenable to us than is the presence of the living God - indeed we all too readily confuse the two - we need to ask ourselves over and over - What do we Really want? Do we Really want Him? Will we Empty ourSelves to receive Him?

The Carmelite, Ruth Burrows in her book, 'to believe in Jesus' - puts this in terms of a fast.

"Faith is a fast", she says, "it is a refusal to put anything in the place of God, and an acceptance of the consequent sense of deprivation. Faith refuses to seek sensible assurances our nature craves for, and insists on looking beyond, reaching out to Him who cannot be savoured in this life. For the one who had given his heart to the Lord there is a perennial fast whilst this life lasts"

Lent Meditation - It's not about Me

The writer Marva Dawn is someone whose work I enjoy and learn much from. She has had a Very tough life and 'suffered greatly at the hands of many physicians', although she has on occasion joked that if she lived in another country she may well have been written off medically a long time ago :)

That tough life has produced what is at times an apparently brutally realistic faith. It is said of her that one day she was leading worship in a church, and at the end was approached by a member of the congregation, who said 'I did not like Any of the hymns you chose today!' Quick as a flash Dawn replied. 'That's OK - we weren't worshiping you, we were worshiping God' Ouch!!

Lent, if we will let us teaches us this Most Vital Lesson - a Lesson which is Central to a Living faith - that We are Not the Centre, God is. We give things up to deny ourSelves and in that denial begin to realise just How central to our faith we are - that we do NOT like to deny ourselves, to lose our life to find it.

Christ at the end of forty days has laid his life down - in a sense the shadow of the Cross has already done its work. If there is anything there now, it is the Life of God his Father. And that is revealed in the confrontation with Satan - Every response focusses on God. 'Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God', 'Do Not put the Lord your God to the test', 'Worship the Lord your God - him only shall you serve' (remembering that to Serve is to Worship (you cannot Serve God and Mammon).

Lent is a time when we strip back - in effect laying our life down - to reveal what lies underneath - what lies hidden from even our own gaze. And this is to learn hard truths about ourselves for the heart is deceitful and hiding, like our first parents.

And our hearts greatest deceit is to allow us to create a faith for ourselves which is 'Me shaped' - a comfortable 'god', 'god' in our own image. Of course it may well be that for some reason or other the 'god' we create is harsh or cruel, but just as often this 'god' is one who comforts us. Either way it is an inner reflection of the 'god' we want, the 'god' who we create to protect us from God. The 'god' who is just a pitiful image of ourselves.

Either way we detect this false 'god' when life overwhelms us - when this protective 'god' we have crafted for ourselves is inadequate and crumbles. The shattering of this mould can be very disorientating - it is like being cast adrift on a vast ocean - for formerly we had taken our bearings in effect from ourselves - we were our own inner compass. It feels like we are losing our faith, that God is now distant. And many interpret it in that way to their great loss. But in truth all it reveals is how far we have strayed from him in our own hearts - how small we had made the love of God, that it was just the echo of our own closed heart. When the false 'god' shatters, then we find ourselves exposed to the Living God, whose Life is more overwhelming than any overwhelming of Life.

At such times we need wise counsellors - those who have already known what it is like to sail upon this vast ocean that is the Love of the Living God - who have not grown used to it, who do not find it safe, but know that it is Good - that here and here alone may we know the fulness of Life. Such guides can help us to learn to Trust that He is Near, even when to our dimmed sight, dull ears and storm tossed psyche, He seems now remote.

I guess one way to put it is this - that when we have much, i.e. a life we have crafted for ourselves, then our 'god' must be small to fit in. But when we lose it all, then we discover that God is not small and manageable - it is a terrible shock to the system, but it is the equivalent of a defibrillator going to work on a heart that to that point has not been brought to life.

Until we learn that our 'god' is not God - we have not yet learnt that our life is not LIFE. 

It is at this point that the journey of Faith begins in earnest

Lenten Meditation - The Temptation to be Powerful

Henri Nouwen lists the temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness as: - 'to Relevance' - "you're hungry? Turn the stones into bread!"; 'to Spectacle' - "Throw yourself from the Temple"; and 'to Power' - "Worship me and all this will be yours".

Lent challenges all three of these head on - there is nothing more irrelevant than withdrawal from the world and aspects of our life we feel to be so significant - there is nothing spectacular about the hidden work of the Spirit as exemplified in Jesus' teaching in Matthew 6 - and when you're  so hungry you cannot lift a finger, all your 'power' is gone from you'.

All three speak to deep anxiety within us, Fear - the root and fruit of all sin. But of the three it is perhaps the Temptation to Power which speaks most seductively. We are surrounded by Fear of being powerless, just think for a moment how we fear poverty, or old age, or debilitating illness - all those things which in no way good in themselves, are doubly damned in our eyes as they rob us of Power, of Self determination.

And the temptation to Power is itself doubly seductive in that it both conceals and feeds The Cardinal Sin - Pride. 'Look at what I can do!' - 'Look at what I have Done!' - 'Consider this fine Life I have made for myself!'. With Power we can have life the way we want it, or so we would like to think. Fear desires Power and thus is the root of Pride - the self made life.

And so Satan comes to Jesus to tempt him - 'you can have Everything you want . . .'

'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven'

Now we all know that Satan fell because of his Pride - but reading these words from Jesus in their context in the tenth chapter of Luke's gospel, we might be blinded to the fact that that is what he is talking about to his disciples. Jesus has just sent them out to go ahead of him, labourers into the harvest field, and  - 'The seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" ' Jesus responds immediately with the words about the fall of Satan - and it is too easy to think he is referring to Satan's defeat. So schooled are we in the dualism of cosmic warfare - (yes there is a warfare but it is far far more subtle than we allow) - that we imagine this is about Christ's Victory - yet is it not rather a warning to the disciples about Pride?? 

Jesus goes on 'See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’ Do not rejoice in what you can do!! Remember I have seen the consequences of Pride - I saw the great angel Satan Fall. 
The fundamental call is to Faith in the Love of God, that drives out Fear and thus can never be a fuel for Pride. When we fall into the Sin of Pride of what we have done and can do - we then Need Power for nothing else will sustain the life we choose to make for ourself, that we now have no choice but to make having rejected the free gift of Life. Thus we are always at root Afraid. The Proud Person is Afraid.

'Satan is Afraid!' many tub thumping preachers have said - whipping up the cosmic conflict. 'Satan is afraid because he knows his final defeat in imminent!!'. This is not so. Not that Satan is not defeated. But his fear is not caused by his defeat, rather he is defeated because he is afraid. He has been defeated from the first. The most oft repeated command in scripture is precisely Do Not Be Afraid. It is as if it is the root of everything. As John says, the one who fears has not been made perfect in Love, for Love casts out Fear.

The temptation to power is very subtle - it seems to promise us everything and it works on our weakest point, that is our lack of faith in the Goodness of God. It whispers in our ear, 'You Are Responsible' - God will not come through with the goods - why not do it yourself?? And we listen and are afraid and cast around for that which will build us up and having found it we become full of Pride.

Power and 'Success' in Ministry

Recently I've noted a disturbing video. In it two prominent church leaders in the USA criticize one of their fellow ministers for relinquishing his very 'successful' pastorate. It is well critiqued on the excellent blog 'Lost in the North' and also in the journal 'Out of Ur', but what I cannot get away from  is the strong suspicion that these powerful leaders cannot bless this other minister in his bold move because they are at root afraid. What would they look like if all the trappings of big church were removed?

Fear does this - it entraps us - it entombs us.

Dante in his Inferno finds Satan in the seventh circle of hell, literally entombed in ice.

Satan rejected the gift of Life - Afraid of Love, thus sought Power in and of himself and so fell

This Fall is the Universal fall

Fear seeks Power which feeds Pride

It is a deadly trap - it is why we Must go out into the Wilderness - casting those those things aside upon which we have come to depend, that we might learn not to be afraid, but there to freely bear the beams of Divine Love.

'No Man is an Island'

As we pursue this idea of Lent stripping us, that we are revealed for what we are in our essence, it may well be easy to say that it reveals how we are 'individuals'. Yet such an idea, that 'we are all individuals', is anathema to Christian faith, however loudly some may aver. And indeed in purely philosophical terms it must be denied, for how an we know that we are 'individuals' without comparison with the other? So even our 'Individualism' requires others.

To be an 'individual' is to be less than that which we Are in Truth.

The phrase 'the Image of God' is one of the most dangerous in Scripture - [God's Love is from the First a Risk] - for through our sinfulness we all too readily reverse it's meaning. That instead of  taking our reference for what it means to be Human from the God who makes himself known to us in Christ, humans all too readily think our 'best' ideas of what We take to be human, and project them onto 'god'. We create 'God in our Image', a broken and shattered image, 'exchanging the Glory of the immortal God, for a Lie'. 

But let us turn our gaze from this human tragedy, to the glory of Immortal God, whom our faith teaches us is Father, Son and Spirit. Three in One and One in three. 'Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Essence'. Thus in God's being what do we find,  not Individualism but Persons in Communion. Only within the Being of God can we begin to comprehend the Human, and here we discover that I cannot speak of 'My life', nor you of 'Your life', in any sense of possession. For the Father freely lays down His Life in sending the Son into the World, the Son who only does what he sees the Father doing, freely lays down His Life - neither saying 'My Life', rather saying 'My Life is in effect 'Yours', Given to you. And this Self Giving is given full expression in, to, and through us in the Spirit - 'God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us' 

It is in this laying down our lives that we discover that Life is not so much In us as Between us.

Lent, if we will let it is given that we might learn Not to call our life our own, and so like the manna kept overnight, discover it is turned to maggots, but rather through the disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving relinquish our hold on the life given to us that it might in truth become Life - called into communion and community, into Lives shared, for it is only in the sharing that Life comes into Being, in the space Between.

Lent - the buried Treasure

One of the difficulties of writing as a discipline, is running dry. But this is in itself perhaps the Essential teaching of the Lenten season. The stripping away of Everything, to reveal that which we cannot imagine, buried as it is under the life we have built for ourselves.

One of the difficulties for us in understanding Christ is that we understand him to be both fully human and also fully divine, and we understand neither. Our perception of what it is to be fully human is distorted by so much of our own life stories, the people amongst whom we live and have been brought up and Sin. We fail to understand that we see 'human' as through a glass darkly, so when we think of Jesus in his humanity, we tend to interpret him poorly and when he does or says something which seems to us extraordinary, we assume he must as it were have switched over to Divine power, say in the stilling of the sea, or the many healings, or indeed perhaps in his Temptations in the wilderness.

 Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.

It is all too easy to understand Jesus' passing the test of the temptations either humanly but erroneously, or divinely. So we may think that Jesus in his humanity acts as we would in his temptation. He heroically summons up something within himself, as if it was the very last shred of his strength. Or we allow that after 40 days, humanly speaking there is no strength and thus he switches on the Superhero (Divine) Jesus to deal with Satan. Much preaching on the temptations seems to come across in this 'Jesus, the superhero' vein, be it human or Divine.

But this is to misunderstand both the humanity of Jesus and his Divinity, because it misunderstands what is human (and thus have little conception of what is 'the Image of God' - our Clue to  Divinity).

Jesus in the Desert is stripped back til in and of himself he has nothing

All he has is the Gift of the truly human life, the life which is pure Act, pure response to God's call. This testing comes at the start of his ministry to ensure that in his life he is Pure Life. Truly Human. That the identity which he has just Heard at his Baptism is fully revealed. 

Lent is a time of stripping back, and it feels dry and empty. the life we have chosen for ourselves seems so Good and Full - why Deny ourselves?? And so very often we do not stick with it well or long. The truth is that our lives are given to us as one long Lent, in which the lives we have built for ourselves might be stripped away to reveal at base what we are, not the life we made, but the Life that is Gift - the Life that is Response to God, the Life that Knows its true Home.

A friend of mine has in a sense made a Lenten journey over several years. Everything has been stripped away and she speaks of a sense of having Lost everything, but then . . . wonder of wonders a Vocation. She is perturbed. How can this be, given all that I have gone through?? Yet is it all this strange? For how can we hear clearly the call of the Father, how can we respond to that Voice whilst our lives are so full of what we have made for ourselves. The desert is a place of often painful stripping away of what seems like everything - but then the everything is revealed for what it is, a thing of horror - a lie, a false life. Following the stripping away the buried Life of pure response to God is revealed. Vocation.

So it is with Jesus. When all is stripped away - what he is at base is revealed, the Obedient Human.

True human - under all the falsity - 'This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond - Is immortal diamond'

May we do Lent, and do it thoroughly

Lenten meditation - The Temptation to be Spectacular

One of the gifts this stripping away that Lent offers us, in its reduction of our lives to the Essence of Life, is that it reminds us of the Ordinariness of life. It teaches us that life is mundane, and that it is in the seeming small things, the seemingly lifeless land of stones and sand, that Life is Given and Found. 

Abandoning the many many distractions available to us, something at which our society more than any other before has become adept, life is reduced to simple keepings - the trivial round, the common task. Keeping a Holy Lent is dull, frankly. Church has no flowers. All our treats are firmly locked away in the cupboard. All we have is life in the Ordinary.

And herein we discover something of our rejection of the Life that is offered us - for we find 'life in the ordinary' to be Not Enough. Frankly, we are bored - we long for excitement - we long that life would be More. Like the children of Israel in the Wilderness, our heads are spinning with dreams of metaphorical fleshpots and groaning boards. And so conditioned are we to our 'fallen life', we fail to recognise that those dreams are actually false remembrances of our captivity - for they were phantoms of 'Egypt'. We'd rather be slaves to fantastic dreams than live the Life that is Gift.

We thirst like the children at Meribah. We thirst for thrill, for exictement, for the Spectacular. But instead we are handed a life stripped to its bare essentials, to learn true faith - Trust in the Ordinary things of Life.

A fellow priest spent several years working in difficult circumstances - the soil was rocky and there was little response to his preaching and ministry. But his words spoke of this Life in the Ordinary. He said, 'You know? When all the world seems paved with concrete, you really begin to see and rejoice in the sheer beauty of one blade of grass' ( I guess that is why there is so much joy in heaven over the one sinner who repents :)  )

We need not bid, for cloistered cell,
Our neighbor and our words farewell,
Nor strive to find ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky.

Religious people have always been faced with the temptation of trying to avoid the Ordinary and build a spectacular life. The ways of Spectacular religion are well trod and are of course encouraged by the world in which we live, which feeds of a religion which reflects its own worst instincts. 

But this also happens at the individual level. The disciplines spill over the edge into a means of feeding the ego. We speak of abandoning the world, but we take the world with us into our 'Righteous acts'. (As the desert father and all Wise folk know, you take the World into your cell). In so doing, in choosing the false life of Spectacle, we miss the spectacular Life that is under our nose

The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves, a road
To bring us daily nearer God.

Satan in the wilderness challenges this 'Boredom with the Ordinary' - he tries to incite Jesus to a Spectacular life - throw yourself off the Temple!  As we follow Mark's recounting of the story of Jesus in this year of the Lectionary, we find Jesus confounding our understanding of life. He does precisely the opposite - he rejects All attempts to Go Public. His ministry is hidden, as Life is. Buried in a field, lost under the furniture, discovered whilst feeding pigs, Revealed in a naked dead Jew nailed to a Roman cross. Here is Life. All here in the Ordinary.

Lenten Almsgivings - Almsgiving (5)

Well I had intended to end this series on Almsgiving with my last post, but a chance comment from a dear friend triggered a further thought, with regard to the secrecy of Almsgiving - 'do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing'.

I have already expressed this in terms of the Reckless Love of God, and Abundance and Light that we flee from, such careful and fearful lives do we lead - seeing perhaps what the World does to those who dare to Live in the Light, rather than the shadow of fear.

However another way to express this Giving, is that of Authenticity. Lent is meant to be a time of paring back to the Essence. What was the Wilderness, for Israel, for Christ, but to 'let go of everything that hinders', that which some nowadays call 'the false self'. Jesus in the Wilderness fasted forty days and was left with nothing, but his Essence - there was nothing but his Pure Life, nothing to sustain him, save who he Was.

Sin, or to put it another way, the Avoidance of God, is like an accretion. Slowly we build a life for ourselves, hiding from God, denying the Life that we have been given. Lent is a time to take hold of the disciplines of the church, and thus, in letting go of those things which we use to build our own life, to discover within ourselves how far that process has taken us away from a Life which is Gift.

With regard to our Human Nature, we in the West tend to fall into one of two errors. Those who are, for want of a better word 'Conservative' (particularly those who take their lead from Calvin), in an effort to magnify the Grace of God (which needs not be done - God needs no advocates :) ), speak of the Depravity of the human heart. As if our Essential nature is Evil, by virtue of Adam's Sin.
Those of a Liberal bent, in part reacting against this, use the phrase 'Image of God' to Justify our sinfulness - that we are by and large Good. Neither I believe is correct, or indeed is ultimately of any use in our journey into God.

Here, Orthodox (Eastern) theology comes to our rescue with its Insistence on the Goodness of our Essence - that we are Created Good and that Nothing can undo that, but at the same time that Who we Are can be Readily buried under our 'false self', our determination to say No! to God, to say No! to who we Are, by our determination to sin.

In Lent, in going into the desert, in prayer and fasting and almsgving, we allow God to remove the layers of filthy rags, our hopeless efforts to be ourselves rather than Be OurSelves - Goodness Created In Love, Through Love and For Love.

When we are stripped away to our bare Essence, we lose our Sense of self - for that is something we have created. Rather we become that which we were always meant to be Pure Act. Nothing now is self conscious, all there is is the Conscious Self, fully Alive - giving no heed to living  - just Alive. No longer living in the realm of careful and fearful calculation, rather set Free through forgiveness and healing to Be. Such that the left hand has no idea what the right is about, and what's more sees no point in caring about it.

This sense of who we truly Are is expressed all around us in the rest of Creation, which waits with eager longing for us to join in and Be children of God.

This is given no better expression than in the life of Christ, who is unSelfconscious, who only does what he sees the Father doing. And this is beautifully spoken of in this wonderful poem of Authenticity written by the Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. that as the rest of Creation cannot help but be Authentic - Christ in Us sets Free Authentic Life. What I Do is Me, for that I came.

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Living with Nothing to lose

"Dust you are and to dust you shall return

Turn from your sin and be faithful to Christ" 

In the liturgy of the church, there is perhaps little to match the seriousness of this declaration, made as a cross is marked in ash on the forehead of a fellow Christian. Echoing the words of God to the Man and the Woman, it reminds us of the most obvious fact about us, that we will die. 

A fact that we hide from at our peril and yet one which our contemporary society seems hell bent on ignoring. Perhaps it is the sign of the end of yet another age, but we seem to pour more and more energy into "Amusing ourselves to death" (to borrow Neil Postman's memorable phrase), which is another way of saying 'ignoring it altogether.

It was not so very long ago that evangelists would appeal to The Fact with regard to conversion - "choose for Christ now - before it is too late, then when you face death you will face it with confidence".  But more and more the emphasis with regard to faith and death has been, "we believe in life before death", to borrow the slogan of the charity, Christian Aid.

Both in their own way miss the point - both are right and both are wrong. Lent sharpens the issue up for us. 

In the Wilderness Jesus learns total trust in God, his Father. In turning down Satan's offer of three easy ways out, ways of avoiding the Cross, Jesus faces that which we must all face. He begins to live as one who has already died - for in death where else will we place our trust and our hope??

But what a life he Lives, as though dead.

The Evangelist gets it right, for we must all die and face God. But he gets it wrong with regard to timing, for we are called to die before our bodies do it for us. Turning to Christ and following Him is not about what will happen some years down the line, it is the decision to die to ourselves and thus enter Life, Now. Life before death, as the charity says correctly, but That Life is only found through the death of self denial and following Christ, in losing everything that we might find Life. It is a Life that is before our physical death but not apart from death. It is not the stuff of simple slogans. 

Rather it is Life through death, before death and overcoming death.

Putting off heaven 'til you die misinterprets eternal life in terms of chronology, that we enter the Kingdom when our bodies expire. The reality is that in Christ the Eternal has stepped into time, that we might in time step into the Kingdom Now, by getting the dying stuff over and done with.

Dust you are and to dust you shall return - we are confronted with the seriousness of death, as were the man and the woman. But a new and glorious way has opened that we might get our dying over and done with, so that we might truly Live - Turn from your sin and be faithful to Christ. 

It is in dying that we Live. In letting go of the small, petty things we think so Significant that we 'Could Not Possibly Live' without them, we discover that we weren't living at all. We are asked through disciplines of self denial to discover that if we stop living for ourselves and start living in and thru and for God, we enter Life.

In a sense we already know something of this in our world - for there are those who are faced with death who suddenly find new life in that they have nothing to lose.

This points us to the Truth - that in losing everything for his sake, we literally have nothing to lose, not even our life - and thus we are set Free to Live.

The Risk of Faith

Yesterday's meditation, based on the writing of Ruth Burrows spoke of the Risky nature of faith.
That Lent calls us to understand faith in a Naked and perhaps terrifying Rawness. So Sharp is the challenge we might almost call it 'the Wound that is faith'.

She spoke of the Stinging rebuke of Jesus to the disciples in the storm - ' "Why the panic? Where is your faith?" Is he not saying, [she asks] "Does it matter if you go down if I am with you?"'

Will we risk all on Him and His Love for us? 

After Jesus has been driven by the Spirit into the wilderness where he fasted for forty days and nights - he is tested by Satan. And each challenge, like his successful tempting of the man and the woman in the garden is based on a subtle shift in the Truth. It is one which we perhaps miss, so enamoured and misunderstanding are we of Jesus' miracles.

'If you are the Son of God' - the Accuser begins - 'change these stones into bread.'

We miss the non-sequitur. Being the Son of God has Nothing to do with being a miracle worker. Satan tries to wrong foot Jesus as he had tried to wrong foot the children of God once before, by questioning their very nature as those whose Life comes not from within themselves, but from above (unless you are born from above you cannot see the Kingdom of God).

"Change these stones into bread?" - "throw yourself off the Temple?" - "bow down and worship me?".

At once these are things that Jesus can do and cannot do. He cannot because he is a child of God, he can because he in his true humanity he can do anything, just as the man and the woman could take the apple and eat. So he was open to temptation, tempted as we are in Every way.

And these challenges are very tempting because they suggest, like that primeval temptation, that they will deliver the goods. [The Ends Justify the Means is The Prevailing Way of thought however much we deny it] But the man and the woman lost sight of the Ends and so lost sight of the Means, the only Means given in Creation, the Life of God - 'Apart from me you can do nothing'.

In so doing they reap Death for they deny the Life that is given that they might Live. Exchanging the Truth of God, for a lie.

Perhaps more than ever we live in a world where the Lies of Pragmatism and Utilitarianism are writ large. We live in a world where we are told that, in order to succeed you Must . . . well we can all fill in our own pet 'Rules for Life' here - our own understandings of what makes for 'the good life'. And blindly we follow them, and then wonder why it doesn't work. 'There must be a way to make it all work!', and if we are religiously inclined we will of course co-opt our puny faith in the god [sic] who makes our lives work for us, and will surely make the world work is we only ask him to bless our plans, our work and our lives. Reaching out for the next Snake oil seller with his "Hundred Proven ways to Succeed" And in so doing we reveal that we do not know who we are, consumed as we are in the lies that turning stones into bread, throwing ourselves off temples or indeed worshiping the Adversary in one of his many guises will do it for us. So desperate are we to live by anything, rather than admit we are not masters of our own destiny and take the risk of  faith.

One of the great gifts of Lent is the stripping away of the illusory powers that are in our hands, 

the revealing of our own perception that in some ways we Are miracle workers 

rather than Children of God. 

It is in coming face to face with our utter powerlessness that we might perhaps be saved if we dare keep in that path and not turn back

Perhaps this is why we do not fast, pray or give alms much if at all?

"Does it matter if you go down if I am with you?"