Originally posted Here

February 13, 2013 was the beginning of the season of Lent this year. Lent is often a very misunderstood tradition within Christianity as a whole with often only a handful of clerics and pastors who understand its purpose and meaning. To most, it’s a 40 day period where you give up something you like to please Gawd because we are such horrible creatures. It is treated like a New Years resolution where self-improvement and pleasing this Gawd becomes one and the same with this self-improvement aspiration. This misses not only the purpose but also the meaning of Lent.

Lent is one of the earliest practices of in Christianity. It was an initiation ritual that some early Christian communities required new converts to go through before they could join. It models the forty days Jesus was in the wilderness after being filled with the Holy Spirit. This ritual is symbolic of gnosis. It represents becoming aware of the first mystery of this world. It is recognizing that we are perishable meat sacks in the wilderness under the authority of the Rulers of this World. It is becoming aware of our mortality and how temporary this life is. The sacrifice represents giving up one of the temporary distractions that blinds us from our mortality and from the painful truth of life. The painful truth is that all matter will perish; including our bodies and the material things we give value.

Like Jesus was tempted in the wilderness as described in Luke and Matthew, we ourselves are tempted in the wilderness. We are tempted to command to turn rocks into bread. Jesus’ response was that man does not live on bread alone but on every word of God. While some will say this justifies being a Biblical literalist, this misses the mark of the significance of his answer. There is more to life than just having needs and wants met. Living life is much more than being a machine that consumes and seeks comfort. Living a true life is much greater than being content. It is about going through trials and tribulations and facing them with courage, faith if you will.

The next temptation depending on which version of the story you go with is that Jesus is brought to the top of the temple and told to jump, the angels will protect him. His answer to the tempter is “Do not test God.” Now anyone who has read the Bible knows that God is tested many times by prophets and even 1 John tells us to test all spirits so this may seem rather puzzling. In this temptation, Jesus is quoting a passage from Isaiah where the word “test” would be better translated to mean “foolhardy” or “reckless”. Just because we are children of God, we are under the authority of the Rulers. Everything that descends down into the world of matter is subject to their laws. Be courageous in your faith but do not be reckless or foolhardy in it. Be wise in your judgment and pick and choose your battles and what trials you are willing to submit to undergo. We are mortal after all.

The final temptation, again depending on which story you go with. The tempter takes Jesus to the top of the world and displays all the kingdoms and says, “They can all be yours if you only worship me.” Jesus responds, “Worship only God and serve only him.” Now again this is one of those passages that if taken literally it misses the entire meaning of the answer. God is a loaded word in western culture meaning 1001 different things to different people. Now one could take this to mean the God of Israel but this would exclude us Gentiles. What we know about God is that God, within the context of Christianity, is that God is the source of life, truth, and genuine love (not the Hallmark romantic bullshit). Worship is also a word that has degraded and changed over time. Worship is an act of emulation. If you worship someone, you emulate them. So now let us put it all together. One does not “rule” anything by following an illusion and going against truth. Life is not about living a lie for material gain or prestige or following false images of greatness.

We are like Christ in the wilderness. Our wilderness is the Desert of the Real. The first step is acknowledging that we are in it. We are not in paradise but in a wasteland painted to give one the delusion that we are in paradise. This is particularly true of us in the western world and well off. The first temptation we have is that all we need is comfort and pleasure, the hedonistic trap. We over come this by knowing that there is more to life and happiness than just meeting biological needs. The second temptation is that we are the greater than the Desert. We are not. We are humans and subjects of the Desert, nothing more and nothing less. While we can overcome the desert we cannot be foolhardy about our capacity to overcome it and under estimate its force. The final temptation is that since the desert is an illusion, we can manipulate it and rule it and those in it. Illusions fade and pass away, but reality is always there.

As depressing as it is to think and focus on our mortality, it a necessary preparation for the next holiday in the Christian calendar and for the next step in one spiritual journey. The time when we learn that truth cannot be killed and we sacrifice the false images for reality. This is Easter, the day of the resurrection of Christ. May we sacrifice our false selves and be resurrected into a new life of truth.