LENT 2015
Sacred Heart Chapel
I want to ask you to close your eyes for a moment and use your imagination to picture a worm becoming a bird. A worm turning into a bird. I saw this drawing on a logo that a parish was using as an image for Lent. A worm turning into a bird.
Of course, a worm turning into a bird is essentially what happens inside the chrysalis of a monarch butterfly. Scientists still don’t understand how, inside just two weeks, a caterpillar turns into a completely different creature. Inside the chrysalis, the major structures of the caterpillar are completely dissolved, and new organs and structures are formed. A new heart, new lungs. Wings grow out of nowhere.
In a sense, that’s what Lent, this great season of grace, is all about. We can think of Lent as a 6 week chrysalis in which you and I are invited to shed our earth-bound, ordinary, default living and, through deep reflection on our choosing and with the grace of God, emerge into the faithful, hopeful and loving living which is the mark of God’s beloved sons and daughters, the people made new by Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
The intense activity inside this Lenten chrysalis will turn, for each of us, on two questions: what am I worshipping? And will whatever God I worship free me or destroy me?
In a commencement address before he took his own life, the modern American writer, David Foster Wallace, asserted: “There is no longer any such thing as an atheist. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type of things to worship – be it Jesus or Allah or Yahweh…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. Guaranteed.”
He went on to say: “If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
“Worship power and you will always feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep them at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”
Entering the Lenten chrysalis, we ask ourselves: What am I taking for granted? What do I fear will never be able to change about me? What am I worshipping, and will it free me or will it destroy me?
Pope Francis said it well just week: “Lent is a time to shake ourselves from our lethargy.” It’s a time to question our defaults. It is time to let the useless things and the harmful things fall away so that the Lord may give us a new heart, a new spirit, and new wings with which we might fly to Him.
The process inside the chrysalis, the method by which we discern our defaults, will involve precisely the three disciplines the Church recommends for Lent: prayer, which helps us to face our ingratitude and our sense of entitlement; fasting, which invites us to face our compulsions and greed; and almsgiving, which invites us to face or selfishness and indifference toward others.
These disciplines, if we take them seriously, will undoubtedly require us to leave some things behind; but those are the things that really weigh us down and keep us from becoming the persons we are meant to be. When we leave behind ingratitude and entitlement, compulsion and greed, selfishness and indifference, then we actually become free to take on the wings of faith, hope and love. Leaving these things behind, we become transformed.
Today, at the beginning of this opportunity to become transformed into something new, we sign ourselves with ashes to remind ourselves that, without this time to purify our living by examining our defaults, we are and will always only be, worms, crawling about this earth, limited in both vision and potential, devoid of meaning and devoid of hope.
Let us enter this Lenten chrysalis confident that our God, who invites us into It, will bring forth from it more than we could ever ask or imagine.