Lent is the season in which the church as a whole enters into an extended retreat. Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty nights. The practice of Lent is a participation in Jesus, solitude, silence, and privation.

The forty days of Lent bring into focus a long biblical tradition beginning with the Flood in the Book of Genesis, when rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. We read about Elijah walking forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Mt. Horeb. We read about the forty years that the Israelites wandered through the desert in order to reach the Promised Land. The biblical desert is primarily a place of purification, a place of passage. The biblical desert is not so much a geographical location--a place of sand, stones or sagebrush--as a process of interior purification leading to the complete liberation from the false-self system with its programs for happiness that cannot possibly work.

Jesus deliberately took upon himself the human condition--fragile, broken, alienated from God and other people. A whole program of self-centered concerns has been built up around our instinctual needs and have become energy centers-sources of motivation around which our emotions, thoughts, and behavior patterns circulate like planets around the sun. Whether consciously or unconsciously, these programs for happiness influence our view of the world and our relationship with God, nature, other people, and ourselves. This is the situation that Jesus went into the desert to heal. During Lent our work is to confront these programs for happiness and to detach ourselves from them. The scripture readings chosen for Lent and the example of Jesus encourage us in this struggle for inner freedom and conversion.

Thomas Keating

Repentance

Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:12-13

Yet even now, says the Lord,
    return to me with all your heart,
with fasting with weeping, and with mourning; 
    rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God,
    for he is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, 
    and relents from punishing.

To repent is not to take on afflictive penances like fasting, vigils, flagellation, or whatever else appeals to our generosity. It means to change the direction in which you are looking for happiness. That challenge goes to the root of the problem. It is not just a bandage for one or another of the emotional problems.

If we say yes to the invitation to repent, we may experience enormous freedom for a few months or for even a year or two. Our former way of life, in some degree, is cleaned up and certain relationships healed. Then, after a year or two, the dust stirred up by our first conversion settles and the old temptations recur: As the springtime of the spiritual journey turns to summer-and fall and winter-the original enthusiasms begin to wane. At some

point, we have to face the fundamental problem, which is the unconscious motivation that is still in place, even after we have chosen the values of the gospel.

The false self is the syndrome of our emotional programs for happiness grown into sources of motivation and made much more complex by the socialization process, and reinforced by our over identification with our cultural conditioning. Our ordinary thoughts, reactions, and feelings manifest the false self on every level of our conduct. When the false self learns that we have been converted and will now start practicing all the virtues, it has the biggest laugh of a lifetime and dares us, saying, "Just try it!"

Now we experience the full force of the spiritual combat, the struggle with what we want to do and feel we should do, and our incredible inability to carry it out. . . . Such insight is the beginning of the real spiritual journey

~Invitation to Love

Prayer

Come, Holy Spirit, open our hearts to the
power of Your Love and set our feet upon the
narrow way that leads to eternal Life.

Dying to the False Self

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Luke 9:23-25

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves?

Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). What is this "self"? It is our thoughts, feelings, self image, and world view. Jesus added, "Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake, will find it" (Matthew 16:25). That is, he will find eternal life, the Christ-life, welling up within.

Faith is not just the acceptance of abstract propositions about God; it is the total surrender of ourselves to God. In baptism, our false self is put to death and the victory won by Christ is placed at our disposal. The dynamic set off in baptism is meant to increase continuously during the course of our chronological lives and lead to the experience of the risen life of Christ within us. In the Christian view, death is thus an integral part of living. Dying to the false self is the movement from a lower form of life to a higher one; from a lower state of consciousness to a higher state of consciousness; from a weak faith to a faith that is strong, penetrating, and unifying.

Participation in the life of Christ means coming to know and love the person of Jesus. The humanity of Christ is our starting point and the door into his divinity Jesus said, "I am the door of the sheepfold. If anyone enters by me, he shall go in and out and find pasture" (John 10:7-9). We enter through the knowledge and love of Christ's humanity into the sheepfold of his divinity, where he invites us to rest in oneness of spirit. The new person that comes to birth in that deep interior rest manifests Christ in the place and time in which he or she lives.

-The Heart of the World

Prayer

Holy Spirit of God, through Your Gift of Knowledge, may all of our self-centered programs for happiness be laid to rest in the sure conviction that true happiness can be found in You alone.

~~~~~