Withering into Truth

Many of us who grew up with Lent hold dark memories of being forced to give up favorite things as penance for our sinfulness—even before we could really sin—with the implied punishment of self-deprivation as preparation for Easter, but more deeply as appeasing an angry God. Whatever the doctrinal intent, without further teaching, this is what we kids absorbed: a cementing of the reward/punishment paradigm that negates Jesus’ concept of a love that self-exists as the oneness at the heart of everything. Lent, the forty days of fasting and prayer before Easter, was originally the rite of passage for those approaching baptism, the transition into new life requiring a complete change of values and perception. Meant to mirror Jesus’ forty days of exhausting deprivation in the wilderness, the church and its people gradually lost the meaning behind Jesus’ suffering, letting it fall into superstition as an end in itself, the penance needed to regain God’s favor. What was Jesus really doing out there? He certainly suffered, but it was a means to an end, a self-imposed sensory deprivation to quiet the noise, remove all distraction to reveal what was true about himself, God, reality. His three symbolic temptations embrace the totality of human ego dissolution, effectively putting down the ego’s need to be relevant, powerful, and spectacular in advance of its own agenda. What Jesus discovered in the fortyness of his wilderness was an agendaless love, indiscriminate and degreeless; that he was identified with that love; that he and that love, the Father, were one. This is what Lent is really about. Deprivation, yes. Discomfort, disturbance of familiar routines, sure. Suffering, maybe. But not as penance in search of reward…as the only means by which we can realize the Father’s agendaless love already full-blown within ourselves. We don’t ascend to this love, perform for it or suffer for it. As William Butler Yeats wrote, we wither into the truth. Lent is the ritual process of intentionally withering our noisy egoic minds to the point we can see what is really true. A process Jesus says is the only Way to the Father.