What are you doing for Lent?

by Kyle Wiseley

We are in the first few days of the forty days of Lent. Lent is the most penitential of the seasons of the church year. Where Advent helps us look within to prepare for the coming of Christ into our lives, it also has a significant element of hope and expectation. Lent inviters us to go more deeply within ourselves, to recognize and confront those attitudes and behaviors that damage ourselves and others. Doing this in a conscientious and serious way is an extremely difficult task. The experience can be like trying to exist in a desert without nourishment or comfort. Traditionally, using some act of personal sacrifice – giving up something – was meant to serve as an aid to self examination and contrition.

Today’s gospel tells of Jesus going into the desert after his baptism, presumably to discern how he was to carry out the ministry the call of which he felt so keenly. While he was there we are told of temptations he was offered: power, wealth, prestige, and release from hunger.

When we attempt a similar experience, we too experience temptation, often the temptation is to judge ourselves too harshly, to over-emphasize the recognition of our mistakes, shortcomings, and intentional sins. Although the desert is a harsh place, we need to remember that it also exists under God’s blue sky and nourishing sunlight and within its harsh boundaries often we unexpectedly discover refreshing oases with cool, pure, refreshing water. The desert is not an evil place – just harsh. It is a place for learning difficult lessons, for finding deep within one’s self, or sometimes with the help of others, hidden pools of spiritual resourcefulness and refreshment.

So perhaps, instead of giving up something for Lent, we might try adding something, perhaps a daily devotional activity or a project or gift to be given without expectation of thanks or recognition, remembering all the while that beyond this desert, this forty days of spiritual penitence and beyond the grief and pain of Christ’s Passion, we eagerly await the dawning of Easter morning and the joy that we feel in the realization of Resurrection.