Light and Darkness: A Lenten Reflection

This is something I wrote more than ten years ago. I think we often forget that Lent (the period before Easter) is meant to be a joyful time of realistic reflection about life and where we are headed.

Quite frankly I don’t know much about the Resurrection. I believe, but I sure don’t know much about it. (Actually I learned a little bit more when I visited El Salvator ten years ago during the twentieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Oscar Romero -- March 24, 1980) What I do know about, what most of the world knows about, is suffering, the passion, death. About that we know a lot. And when it comes to knowing about God and religion, most of us identify much more with Jesus in the garden than we do with him rising from the tomb. God may be more reassuring on the mountain top but he is much closer in the Gethsemane . We feel more confidence before a God who cries out in the garden or is led before Pilate than we do with a God who shines with brilliant light on the mountaintop. Maybe we will get there one day. But right now we need to know that Jesus understands what it is to sweat blood in fear, to be betrayed, to be tortured, condemned and led to the slaughter. Humanity has much more experience of being slaughtered than of conquering death.
We are a very stressed-out society and we face far too many choices every day. Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that there was a time when we read a book or had an experience and then remembered it for the rest of our life. After all there wasn’t too much to read and so we thought about it. There weren’t too many extraordinary experiences and so we mulled them over and over searching out their meaning. Lent is a really good time to begin doing just that !
Today we are bombarded with information from around the world every day. We read far too much – it goes in one ear and out the other. How many can remember the last three books they read? Or what we were reading a year ago? It’s all a maze. Life is full of surprises, yet no one seems surprised. We continue to live as if it were all pre-packaged and without consequence.

Yet we are asked to choose. And our choices have consequences. The invitation of Lent is to address the mystery; recognize the grace we have been given; embrace the challenge of examining our choices, our intentions. We can learn to accept the burden of the pain and suffering introduced into the world by misguided intentions and actions, including our own.