Lent, Facing a Wilderness of Choices

Len t is our annual pilgrimage of preparation for the Paschal Mystery wherein we discipline ourselves for the purpose of sharper perception.  Lent gives us a chance to turn our hearts and thoughts towards the loving purposes of Christ among us. Lent allows us to connect with the ultimate purpose of our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ.  And Lent is a time for decision making.  We are invited to face those things which the world offers as alternatives to an authentic life of fulfilment.  We begin with Jesus in the wilderness.

                Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry.  And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But he answered, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him,”If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’”  Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’”  Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”  Then Jesus said to him, ‘Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” Then the devil left him, and behold, angles came and ministered to him.
                                                                                                Matthew 4:1-11
 
When we make choices it is important that we know the basis on which Jesus made them.
 
All of us have to make decisions.  Sometimes it is far from easy.  We go through a time of real struggle, sometimes actually feeling great resentment.  Sometimes we become depressed by the complex choices before us, and sometimes we feel that we want to run away from the whole thing.  It may well be that Jesus experienced moments like that.  One certainly faced him when he went into the wilderness after his baptism.  Actually the word “wilderness” may be the very best way of describing how we feel when we face making really important choices in our life.  All signposts seem to be missing; we don’t know which way to turn.  There may be unknown dangers if we choose one way rather than the other.  One thing quite certain is that no choice ever provides the perfect answer.  Jesus knew such thoughts as well.
 
He heard the call to public ministry, and had gone south to accept baptism from John in the river Jordan.  Then he faced the difficult task of deciding how he was going to pursue the vision of God’s kingdom which he had been given.
 
Jesus tells us that the devil offered him at least three ways of building the kingdom.  The first was to bribe people into following him.  The second way was to impress them.  The third was by reaching for power.  To each Jesus said no, because he saw clearly that the devil was appealing to self-image and ego and the human longing for position and power.  To build a ministry on what appealed either to his own ego or to the desires of those who followed him would be a betrayal of himself, of his followers, and of his Father.  So Jesus made another choice.  He calls people to come to him and with him, not for what they can get but for what they can give of themselves to him, to one another, and to the world around them.
 
When we are facing a wilderness of choices it is important for us to be clear about the basis on which we are finally going to make our choice.  Are we merely out for our own advantage?  Do we merely wish to build our own image and position?  If so we are failing to bring Jesus into our choosing.  But knowing that Jesus himself experienced the wilderness makes him our companion in our time of wilderness.  That can make all the difference.
 
May your Lent be a time of making good choices.
 

Organic Gift
by Parker Palmer
 
Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side - had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor."

I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint - until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."

When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless - a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other's need to be cared for. That kind of giving is not only loveless and faithless, based on the arrogant and mistaken notion that God has no way of channeling love to the other except through me. Yes, we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.

One sign that I am violating my own nature in the name of nobility is a condition called burnout. Though usually regarded as the result of trying to give too much, burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess - the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have; it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place. 

May Sarton, in her poem "Now I Become Myself," uses images from the natural world to describe a different kind of giving, grounded in a different way of being, a way that results not in burnout but in fecundity and abundance:

As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root...

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself - and me - even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal.
About the Author: Excerpted from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation"