Forty days with the devil
“From dust you came; to dust you will return.”
Hmmm…first Sunday of Lent and we’re already wondering if we’ll be able to afford Easter eggs. Methinks things are getting too grim…
We all are in need of a break. Right now forty days in the desert doesn’t sound too bad…and I don’t mean a condo just off the Vegas strip…someplace a bit more quiet, off the beaten path,,,a place -- to translate out of the vernacular -- conducive to the reassembling of one’s feces.
Trouble is, for most all of us, packing up and heading out for forty days of R&R just isn’t gonna happen, If any reassembling is going to be done, it will be on our own time, a lot closer to home. Looks like this year Lent’s gonna come in handy…
Lent’s something I grew up with. I’ve always regretted it didn’t start with a trip to Mardi Gras, but throwing beads and unrestrained revelry just wouldn’t have been Lutheran. I knew it was Lent when, as soon as the supper dishes were done, Mom hauled us to church on Ash Wednesday and every subsequent Wednesday night until Easter. It was harder on the Catholic kids down the block. They were expected to give up cartoons, candy, ice cream or some other item that made elementary school life worth living. If nothing else, Lent was a six-week reminder of how good we had it the remaining forty-six.
What was exactly what it was intended to do.
And still can.
Now I’m not saying that a six-week abstinence from Hershey bars is somehow going to spark some soul-deep solace. I never did think that’s how it’s supposed to work. In the gospel story Lent’s based on, Jesus goes out to the desert for forty days to fast and to pray. In a secular sense, he didn’t just go without, he did some deep, serious thinking; the kind of thinking that stays with you after you’re back home eating lunch regularly
This year I don’t think anybody has to skip lunch and sit on a rock to realize we’ve got troubles, and it ain’t gonna take forty days to know what they are.
What we have to do is come up with ways to resolve them.
And that will be hard. Walt Kelly had Pogo say it best, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
That’s not to excuse, or worse yet, to ally with lies, liars, the denial of facts, suppression of evidence, willful ignorance, misanthropic malevolence, and plain, old nasty behavior – “Get behind me, Satan!” pretty much says it all.
What’s not so easy is recognizing Satan in the first place…and no, I’m not talking some literal “devil made me/him do it” demonology, but the d’evil writ large. There’s real insight in the idea of being possessed by a demon – having our thoughts and actions directed by an evil dwelling within us, foreign to our real character, but exerting a power over us, nonetheless. When I think of Jesus’ forty days in the desert, that’s what stays with me.
And to bring this down to the world where we’re living, all that theology-talk comes down to the realization that if something needs to change to solve a problem we’re involved with, odds are we’re part of that something that needs to change. What’s tough is recognizing what that is … and then changing it.
It’s none too likely any of us will be taking extended PTO in the Sahara in the immediate future, but we really don’t have to. A small Lenten ritual, be it a passed up Hershey bar, shutting off the TV an hour before bed, or picking up an extra pound of hamburger to drop off at the food shelf every trip to the grocery store, can bring us to a few moments in our personal desert to noodle out what we need to be doing if what we need to do will ever get done.
It may not be devils we need to face. It may not be anything evil at all. What we may need to do is simply understand. Take the time to walk that proverbial mile, see things in a way we hadn’t thought of, put on shoes that are unfamiliar to us. The desert is a strange place, a place hostile for most of us, not a place we care to be.
Which is why we need to go there.
We have much to learn.
And much we need to do…right here.