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.