Our religious understanding of Lent has become truncated — reduced to little more than a manufactured attempt to merit God’s grace.  The focus the church has espoused is one of penance which most often takes some form of self-abasement — promoting a wallowing in a man-made sense of unworthiness.  This perception is fostered by an emphasis on self-denial and abstinence which is typically manifest in a temporary expression of some superficial renunciation of first world luxuries (such as not consuming meat or not eating chocolate or not drinking alcohol).  The perceived benefit of our self-imposed asceticism — aside from encouraging a sense of self-righteousness — is procuring God’s favor and blessings both in this life and the one to come.  Consequently, the season of Lent is experienced most often as a transactional obligation which must be endured rather than as an invitation to engage with the Divine and grow into our maturity as children of God. 

Such a distorted perspective of the season of Lent inhibits our ability to embrace life fully by growing into the fullness of our humanity.  Instead of opening us to the Mystery that is life, our demand for certitude and need to be in control (and to be right) causes us to experience isolation — becoming cut off from ourselves, one another, our world, and God.  Lent is an invitation to participate in the Mystery that is Life.  Here we are invited to let go of the established order with its illusions of stability and permanence.  The summons is to embrace the unknown — the wilderness — which, though disorderly, wild, and transient, exposes us to the deep Mystery that is Life.  It is only when we let go of the illusions of our independence and certitude that we become capable of perceiving God in our midst and experiencing the sacredness that is Life.

Thomas Keating, a Cistercian priest, noted that there is only one sin that afflicts humanity — the refusal to grow.  We are created in the image and likeness of God.  We are children of God.  We have been given the power/ability/authority to live as children of God.  The spiritual journey is the journey of self-discovery.  We spend most of our lives developing our personality (aka, the ego-self or the false-self).  This is the natural and necessary course of development for a human being.  However, the establishment of the personality or the ego-self is not the goal — it is merely the work of adolescence — but a means to an end.  The work of adulthood, of maturity, is integrating the personality with the Soul (aka, our True-self or our God-self).  It is the work of Love — of no longer seeking to be separate but to acknowledge our relationships or connectedness with all of Life.  To become fully human — to live as children of God — is to recognize and acknowledge my oneness with myself, the other, and the Other.  This is what is meant when scripture talks about denying the self or dying to self.  It is not about an attachment to superficial pleasures.  It is the work of letting go of our personality, our ego-self, and identifying not as a separate, autonomous personality but with Being, with “I am-ness.” 

Lent is the cyclical invitation to intentionally participate in the spiritual journey.  The spiritual journey isn’t about worshipping from afar a wholly transcendent God.  The spiritual journey is about opening ourselves to the immanent God “in whom we live and move and have our being.”  The season of Lent is the liturgical reminder of God’s eternal invitation to grow — to grow into the fullness of our humanity.