More from "To Dance with God"--Carnival and Lent

Certainly it is our propensity as humans to fly off into playing at God. Who am I? And if I am called to an important vocation, then it is only right that I have some special privileges, recognition, acclaim, approval, all of which would help me to fulfill my vocation. Arrogance and pride blind us in that moment and we fail to see that vocation demands and emptying of ourselves. The primal sin of Adam was the same temptation. "No, you will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." To be as gods, knowing good and evil is to function alone and independently, the relative trying to be absolute, man committing God.
The "fall" is always a fall upward: pride. The sin is putting the ego at the center of the personality instead of God. The result is isolation, loneliness, a separation from intimacy with the other, a hell that is not so much the punishment for sin but the result of sin. It is that dislocation, that ugliness and strife that indicate our being at odds with ourselves, because in our will to power we have lost love. And indeed we no longer know who we are and what we are about. Beyond our ego-identity is the vocation and calling that is "to do the will of him who sent me." Adam's gift of free will is, at its best, the call to carry out willingly God's will by the power of love. We empty ourselves of pride, power and influence, the gifts and the good things given can be used for God's will, but the inclination is to cling to these gifts as though they were a personal right and proceed to do a loveless and poor imitation of God.
What we cling to is the ego, protecting it, licking wounds, locking ourselves away in a splendid isolation. Paul tells us about this clinging and tells us that we "must be the same as Christ Jesus: his state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross." Only when we have accepted a great task and are open to the whole spectrum of our calling do we suddenly know also our weakness and human inadequacy, our selfishness, our conditional loves. Christ's temptations or questions, like our own, are not just tests, but revelations necessary to self-knowledge and to an understanding of our calling. They tell use who we really are and not just who we'd like to think we are.
When I was a child, the words Vacare Deo hung in the kitchen over the sink each Lenten season and though I was told it meant to vacate--indeed to empty oneself--to God, it was not until very much later, when my developmental task to create an ego-identity was only just coming to a head, that I began to get a glimmer of the painful truth. As children it is our task--and it is right and necessary for our ability to love--to develop a love of self. That love of self must not die; what needs to die is self-love. Hardly have we established a sense of self, an ego, and the task of love asks us to go a step further and give it up. We love, to a degree, but we fear that if we don't keep back the inner, secret place of the self, we will lose ourselves. If we let God have it all, there will be nothing left for us.
What needs to die is not the real self, but the false one, the self that thinks it is whole and complete when, in fact, it is all in pieces. Identity and calling are the first great uncertainties we question as we come to the deserts of our life.
Our fall began earlier in life with the scrambling of the self to a place of autonomy, and is now followed by the dissolution of the personality into questions and confusion. And so it must be or we are not willing to be "led by the spirit" into a place of self-revelation. The opposites come forth to meet us and demand a balance. The simplified good and evil that we knew earlier no longer holds. Playing at God can no longer be our defense against growing and changing. We must love God, which is easy as an abstraction, but what is more we must love our neighbors with the sort of self-love we have indulged ourselves in for years. Furthermore, we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We must take seriously the well-being of every person, even those who for years we excluded from our responsibility as being in the wrong camp, who vote for the other part, our spouse, when we know he or she "is simply wrong," the person at work who is constantly in competition with us.
Suddenly we meet a situation at our most vulnerable place and we know this is the test. We head into the downhill side of our life and are aware of our death. On the road we die a hundred little deaths. We die when we reach out to others, and there is no hope of recognition or repayment. We give up our control of others and we give them the life they are meant to live. Our children are not our creations. We forgive and ask forgiveness. We realize and accept that our marriage may never be the fantasy dream we planned out for ourselves. It has its own reality and its own fate which we can only commit ourselves to with a renewed vigor. We give up the dreams of "in loveness," the love we "fell into," and take up the hard work of loving which has nothing to do with romantic ego-demands: it is the love we make. This love is stronger than death. This love is the only solution where we fail to be trusting, where we disappoint. Love overrides the imperfections of this world. There are no more simple excuses or judgments. This love is not the sort that fulfills and completes us. Rather, it is so centered on the other that our own ego is pulled apart.
Restoration must reverse the process of the fall. Only after we have gone to the depths of self-knowledge and known the hell we have fashioned for ourselves, only when we can love with an identification with the other, can we begin to rise again. Perhaps wearing ashes as we launch our Lent is not so much a statement that we are "nothing but" ashes, as it is the gesture that brings us "down to earth." The fall of Adam, his awareness of death, allows a new consciousness. Consciousness always seems to bring us back to earth.