wilderness, first sunday of lent

Sunday, March 9 (First Sunday of Lent)

Come to Stillness: Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer: Lord I so want to make all of me ready and attentive and available to you.  Please help me to clarify and purify my intentions.  I have so many contradictory desires.  I get preoccupied with things that don’t really matter or last.

     I know that if I give you my heart whatever I do will follow my new heart.  In all that I am today, all that I try to do, all my encounters, reflections, even the frustrations and failings and especially in this time of prayer, in all of this, may I place my life in your hands.  Lord I am yours, make of me what you will.

~Ignatius of Loyola

Scripture Reading for the Day: Matthew 3:13-4:11

Reading for Reflection:

     Lent is a season when we face the wilderness within.  Just as Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness as a precursor to his earthly ministry, we too, must face the subtle temptations to the false self so that we can be “cleared out” for real ministry.  Here we face our own demons and they are rarely what we think!  It is not just the temptation to drink pop or eat sweets or enjoy a glass of wine—as real as those temptations become after we have given them up for Lent.  In the emptiness created by whatever it is we are fasting from, we become more aware of the compulsions of the false self and it is pretty beastly stuff.

     We experience the evil one’s proficiency at crafting very subtle and dangerous appeals to the instinctual patterns we rely on for safety and survival, significance and success, power and control. We see how far we have to go on the journey of learning to trust God and God alone in the wilderness of our most primal impulses and needs.  We are appalled to learn that the false self can and will co-opt anything—including God and the things of God—to secure its own survival, to prove ourselves to others, and to appear successful by whatever standards the group we identify with measures such things.

     A true Lenten journey demands that we look clear-eyed at our lives and wonder, where am I tempted to put even the things of God in service of my instinctual responses to the human situation? In what ways am I tempted to “turn these stones into bread”–using whatever gifts and powers God has given me in order to secure my own survival?  Where am I putting God to the test—continually “throwing myself down” in a display of ministry heroics in order to prove something to myself and others—expecting God to come to my rescue time and time again?  When, where and how am tempted to worship “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” –i.e. the outward trappings of success— rather than seeking the inner authority that comes from worshipping God and serving him only? (The Wilderness Within by Ruth Haley Barton)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Closing Prayer: Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan; Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (A Collect for Lent)