THE SEASON OF LENT : A trip to the desert
Religious festivals especially in the East are so structured as to synchronise Chronological Time with Sacred Time. It is part of the wisdom of ancient traditions that have ensured that the only way human beings can maintain a sense of balance is to allow the train of our lives to run along the twin rails of “Chronos” and “Kairos”. Religious Festivals are merely stops along the journey. One such stop for the Christian as he / she journeys inward towards a deeper realization of Christ Consciousness is the Season of Lent. Beginning on Ash Wednesday, for many, this is a reluctant journey, often made as a ritual. It symbolically replicates Jesus spending 40 days in the desert before his public ministry. For those who wish to go beyond the ritual to the spiritual, it is an invitation to journey into the desert.
Our yearning for what we identify as a “God experience" needs to be tested in the silence of the desert. It is not an escape away from the hustle and bustle of scattered activity we are accustomed to. It is a call not to loneliness but to solitude, the cave of the heart into which we go precisely to give all that we do a meaning and purpose. Without it, we are like the broken spokes of a wheel disconnected from the stillness of the hub at its centre. It is a stillness that embodies the seed of activity so that anything not rooted and grounded in it quickly withers and dies.
The desert offers an opportunity for discernment. It is above all a “learning” experience. One learns not to be taken in by its mirages. The extreme climatic conditions that present themselves have the potential to bring out not only the best in us but also to bring us face to face with the “demons” that afflict us from within. But most of all it brings us face to face with death. It teaches us in no uncertain terms, however, that death and dying are not exactly co-terminal. Death occurs in chronological time; dying is a process that can only be understood in sacred time. It is this shift in perspective that we are invited to embrace. We are to immerse ourselves into the process of continually dying to self.
Before his public ministry, Jesus spends 40 days in the desert, confronting the “demons” of power, popularity and relevance. These are the three principal areas which manifest the “holes” in our personality, the dark side which we must first accept and then allow to disappear for the illusions which they are.
In one his early comments as he began preaching, Jesus refers to another man of the desert who preceded him – his cousin John the Baptist. He was not a reed shaken in the wind but a reed nevertheless. Reeds are characterized by their hollowness and fragility; their ability to be swayed is determined by their rootedness in the earth or lack of it. Yet the very holes on the surface of the reed enable it to produce the sound of music whenever there is a breath of air flowing through.
The ritual anointing with Ashes which begins the season of Lent is meant not so much to remind us of the certainty of death, but rather to immerse us in the process of dying. This means accepting our hollowness as a precondition for the inflow of a breath of fresh air from the Spirit thus producing another harmonic and a deeper resonance each time. Curiously enough it is a process that enables us
to live life more fully and in so doing be life-giving to others as well.
Christopher Mendonca, India
(The author teaches Meditation in the Christian Tradition)
cjwm1943@gmail.com
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