Excerpts From "To Dance with God"--Carnival and Lent

Thinking about Lent is not my favorite thing to do. In fact, I rather hate it. Every year, when the subject comes up, I see myself resist. I can think about Advent, about expectancy. It holds some concerns, but to be impregnated with new life is a rather hopeful subject. During Advent we rejoice as we open ourselves to the mysteries of the marriage of heaven to earth. But in Lent we come to know that the only way to our own healing and wholeness comes paradoxically through dismembering--an appallingly painful process which life offers us, ready or not, and which Lent gives us the form and meaning for. We engage dismemberment and atonement so that we may be transformed through the Easter mysteries and arrive at "at-one-ment."

Jonah learns first that trying to avoid suffering by running away seems to serve up suffering anyhow. Far better he stand still and take what God has in mind for him, because he'll get his share either way and it seems to do less damage when you accept it. IN the whale's belly, Jonah learns to accept suffering and death in his own life and recognizes that he can't avoid it. Then he learns that he has to help others effect change. In fact, he can only effect change and influence others after having experienced the "dark night of the soul" himself. That's the thing about prophets: they have to face the agonies of change in themselves before they understand it well enough to affect-to touch-those around them. That's true, too, in the relationships of spouses and lovers and parents and friends. It's true about the prophets and healers who stand before us as priests and leaders. We cannot hope for change in the other until we have changed ourselves. We cannot change without dying.
Conscious engagement of suffering and death forces us to take stock of our gift of life and consider ways of reforming and living our lives more fully and passionately. We have the company of the rest of the family or community to take this pilgrimage with us, because we are, indeed, all in this together. The very least a communal Lent can offer us is the opportunity to understand mortification so that as suffering comes into our lives, we will recognize it for what it is and have some tools to find in this earthly pilgrimage its mysteries and deepest meaning. Our personal Lent may not always coincide with the communal season of Lent. But we will always have our Lenten seasons, one way or another, because we are always called to change.
Every day, if we live passionately and take risk, we are asked to give ourselves up, to break out of our old patterns of behavior, our interpersonal laziness, our habits to control, criticize or put-down, our selfishness, our fears and reticence--to give up our egos for the sake of something bigger--for something better in ourselves, for the sake of someone else. For the Church's offerings send us back to our human experience and lend us the courage to know ourselves more deeply and to fully engage ourselves in the human events, the relationships, the struggles that make up our days. Our suffering, in and with Jesus, is never separate from our daily struggles.
Misunderstandings, losses and failures, separations and loneliness, loving and longing, the fears we know deep down, all cast long shadows across our days because we cannot come to the light unless we are willing to enter into the darkness. Guilt-the sort that demands a change-suffering, death, are not hot items which the citizens of this world seek out. Rather, we have learned a hundred tricks to avoid those issues in our day and we have been told for years that we must avoid what will hurt. And still we know the sufferings which are self-inflicted and the neurosis which does not allow one to examine and understand the change that must be made. We think we have sold our donkey, like Jonah, and have no means of transportation left ot get us to what is unpleasant. We are so clever: we hop a freight going in the opposite direction. There are drugs to mask every pain and sounds to flood out every silence. But wisdom shows us that holding off painful feelings is a pain in its own right. We can hold off suffering only so long.
Death, so contrary to our natural inclination, may seem like some grim mistake of nature, but the very name of this season, Lent, gives the name of the game away. Lent means spring, and we sing during the Easter Vigil service of the fall of Adam, which was the first taste of death, and call it a happy and necessary mistake which merited us Jesus as Redeemer. We yield up, we fall apart, we die, so that we can bloom anew.