This year, our Lenten season begins on March 5, forty days before Easter, this year celebrated on April 20. Interestingly, Easter is a “moveable feast” whose date is calculated by the lunar calendar. Our world is more accustomed to the “fixed” solar calendar, so Easter offers us a challenge from the beginning, since it cannot be “nailed down” to a specific numerical date each year. The resurrection itself speaks to this elusive world of the Spirit, upon which we depend, but which defies our controlling it. T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” includes this interesting paradox:
Where will the Word be found? Where will the Word resound?
Not here. There is not enough Silence.
Lent invites us into a time of deeper reflection of which silence is our necessary companion. As one spiritual guide says, “Silence gives us the opportunity to hear that which noise ordinarily obscures.”
The forty days of Lent are based on the time Jesus spent in the wilderness facing temptations that would ultimately guide his way to his purpose and service in the world. For us, it is a reminder that our spiritual journey will involve confusing, barren places in which we are being asked to discern our true purpose and the meaning of service in our own lives. Lent asks, “Whom are you serving? What is the ultimate goal which directs your choices, displaying the values you hold?”
One way of looking at the three temptations of Jesus is their revelation of the three temptations of the ego which each of us must face in order to come to a deeper understanding of the life of the Soul. The first is the temptation to omnipotence: that we are able to take care of ourselves without relying upon God or others. “Human beings do not live by bread alone” reminds us to put material possessions in their rightful place, letting go of the illusion that if we only have the “right things” we will be fulfilled.
A second is the temptation to omniscience—that we are the center of the universe and are right about everything. This temptation to pride and arrogance is the root of our prejudices “protecting” us from “those other people”, forgetting that we belong to one another in this human family that God has created.
The third temptation is immortality—that if we are just famous enough or powerful enough, we will live forever. As we accept that God alone is God, and we are not God but are aspects of God, we are open to that Love that transforms us. We are able then to receive the gift of God’s immortal love that gives us immortality. In experiencing Lent into Easter, we live into the Paschal Mystery: life to death to life again—an ongoing process of trust, letting go and receiving over and again.
These temptations would call us away from our soul work: gratitude for life itself, acceptance of God’s love and forgiveness in each moment, and openness to the service into which we are called. May Lent deepen our trust in God, the One who is Love itself, the whole of the creative force to which life has called us.