Lent is the Christian festival of fasting and denial in preparation for Holy Week and Easter. As a young child I was fascinated with the idea of giving up something for Jesus. But, as I grew up I found myself thinking of Lenten denial more as a religious diet, a Weight Watchers for the Soul. Dieting and other disciplines have always been difficult for me so Lent became a time of failure and meaninglessness. I didn’t quite understand how giving up chocolate, pasta or going to the movies for forty days connected me to the Spirit or my spirit. How did it serve my moral and spiritual development? How did it serve the world and the future?
Working with Inner Christmas over the last four years has opened me up to the personal and intimate possibilities living in the rest of the Christian Year. As a counselor/healer/educator, I find the calendar of the soul very important. If I contemplate the life of the soul in relation to the seasonal flow of Nature and the esoteric imaginations of the Christian festivals, what do I see?
Inner Christmas ends with Epiphany. Epiphany is the Baptism of the Christ - the incarnation of the Christ Being into Jesus of Nazareth. Following Epiphany, the mood of the soul is one of seeking knowledge. Winter supports a time of inner reflection on the questions “Who am I?”, “What do I want?” and “What am I doing?” These are destiny questions. We look at our life path of self-expression, of self-manifestation and of self-management. We consider our potential to contribute and to grow. And we attend to the big question of “What gets in my way.”
I believe Lent is the time to work with what gets in our way - the obstacles to our desire to fulfill our destiny. Lent finds its inspiration in the forty days in the wilderness that follow the Baptism. Christ Jesus goes off to be alone - to struggle with gravity, hunger, limitation - the challenges of being human before taking up His Deed for humanity. Each year the calendar of the soul gives us the mood of the wilderness, a yearly time to look at our personal deed and the temptations that seductively promise an existence free from pain, responsibility and discipline.
During the forty days, Christ is tempted three times by Evil. (You can do a google on “three temptations” and find much to read.) In the modern wilderness of soul, three temptations seduce us, individually and collectively. They are very powerful and we often succumb to them. The temptations are prejudice, fantasy and addiction.These are three ways in which we cripple and corrupt our thinking, our feeling and our willing and we distort the flow of time from past to present to future. Inner Lent is the time when we can face and overcome these 3 temptations of our soul.
Prejudice
Prejudice is thinking trapped in the past. Prejudice is pre-judgment. Most of us think of prejudice as being harmful, but prejudice can also be positive. The quality of prejudice is not the temptation. The temptation is the absence of living thinking. A thought that had validity in the past is carried forward, whether or not it has any relevance or meaning in the present. We don’t think - we remember an old lifeless thought. We assume a momentary perception, or concept, is forever.
The Lenten challenge is first to recognize your prejudices. Recognizing your prejudices is so difficult - it is like going into the cemetery of your soul and digging up dead bodies; Or ghost-busting in your soul; Or finding the thought vampires or living dead and driving a stake through their hearts; or shining the light of Spiritual Sun on them.
Make a list of five dead thoughts. These are thoughts that are very familiar in their comfort or discomfort. Consider,: a thought about yourself, a thought about someone you interact with, a thought about your work, a thought about your belief system and a thought about your future. Now explore the truth of each thought in the present moment. Is there any truth or relevancy?
Can you notice your prejudices during the forty days of Lent? Most of us have little awareness of how old our thinking is. Every prejudice is the absence of Spirit. Overcoming the temptation of prejudice means questioning the newness of your thoughts, attitudes and behaviors. What among these prejudices can you make new and imbue with freedom? What likes and dislikes can you examine? What dead thoughts can you give up for Lent?
You might find it less challenging to explore an impersonal thought. We all know the Sun rises in the East. This is a truth that we once thought with living interest. For most of us, it has become information and a dead thought. However, during Lent, wake up every morning and have a living experience of the newly rising Sun.
Addiction
Addiction is the avoidance of pain in the present. With an addiction we take in a substance to create an artificial and temporary harmony in the present. As a society, we tend to think of negative addictions, but there are many more positive addictions to consider. I used the addiction of reading spiritual and self-help books for years and years. I received great value out of my reading but I used it like a drug. I was in pain and, when I read, I was avoiding my pain.
Being in the wilderness is a time to face pain. What you resist, persists. The writer Joseph Conrad wrote “In the destructive element immerse.” Lent is the time to feel the pain of the present. Your Spirit will sustain you through this agony. Whether you suffer with the weight of the past, your hunger for the future or the limitations of the present, your forty days of Lenten suffering will strengthen you. You will spring forth at the end of Lent with a new understanding of your destiny.
Do not forego your biggest, most soothing addiction. Find your small, or medium-sized, addictions. In our age of comfort and anxiety, we need to modulate our inner lives. We go into the wilderness to find wisdom - not torture.
Do you have an addiction for information? Do you face fear when you don’t have all the answers? Can you give up reading the newspaper for forty days, or even five days? Do you avoid anxiety or sadness with addictive physical activity? Can you give up exercise for a week, or moderate your fitness program for forty days? And consider modifying spiritual practices or beauty routines? Spiritual practices can be about avoiding discomfort with material existence and beauty routines can mask the pain of aging or anxiety over feeling desirable. Your inner Spirit is filled with equanimity and compassion and will not abandon you in the wilderness of your pain.
Look at your life and determine which practices, activities, consumptions are motivated by avoidance of pain, of anxiety, of sadness, of self-disgust. This is the real challenge and gift of Lent - recognizing your motives of avoidance and finding the courage to immerse in the destructive elements of your soul.
Fantasy
Fantasy is will trapped in the future. Fantasies are so comforting because we do not need to do anything. We can fantasize the most amazing results and outcomes of our efforts and never take the first step. We don’t need to be in the reality of life. We create worlds and powers and benefits with fantasy. Fantasy is the future that will never come.
Thinking about doing good is not doing good. Good thoughts are not good deeds. Dreaming about possibilities is not fulfillment or contribution, it is just dreaming.
With so much powerlessness in childhood and so much emphasis on being freed from our enchanted castles and witch’s lairs, we learn to deal with the entrapment of our will forces by fantasizing all kinds of happy endings and wild adventures.
Our will needs to be active in the present. We need to free ourselves in the reality of the moment through responsibility and courage. If the work of the wilderness is to have any redemptive or creative power we must pull our will out of the future and act now.
What is the dream of the future that has no present action? What horizon do you see, yet fail to take any step toward? If you were to take just ten steps over forty days, what would those steps be? You cannot be in fantasy when your will is active in the present.
Closing thoughts
In facing the three temptations, do not be grandiose. Be successful in small ways. Just as God is in the details, find your radiant strength of spirit in the elegance and humility of the simple. Self-compassion is about being gentle and tender with your soul development.
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