Another Lent

Lent always calls us to a humiliation that none of us wants to really embrace . It is this humiliation that our Ego would do anything to avoid.

As we lost our innocence in our childhood, we started thinking that we are something. Most adults, especially our parents, taught us that we need to do things better, to be better than others, that we must “try hard”, that we must succeed. We, ultimately, created an “image” of ourselves that did not correspond to the truth, but nonetheless we liked that image and we insisted on proving it to others and defending it at all cost.

Every Lent we were reminded that this “image” we have of ourselves is not true at all. However, every year we try harder and harder to arrive at that “image” instead of letting it go. We’ll never hear Jesus speak words that motivate us to try harder. He is not interested in changing styles and outer looks. He calls us for a radical change. He does not speak about different changes, but one change, one that is fundamental and essential.

For years during Lent we probably tried to improve, change certain things, make little sacrifices, and felt good about them. Each year Jesus reminds us of the “one big change” which does not involve the “doing” much, but rather “letting go”, surrendering and dying. Most of our “doing” is principally returning to the great “image” we have fantasised. “Letting go” is allowing the real “IMAGE” to come forward, that is, the image of God in you. “Letting go feels always like dying,” says often Richard Rohr. Letting go of this “image” feels like dying as this is the only way you know yourself.

So Jesus uses words like, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Jn. 12,24), to explain all this. It feels like dying. But only after this dying that you become “a new creation”.

It requires a big step in humiliation to allow this to happen this Lent.