Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon is pictured on Friday, Dec. 11, 2020. Steve Griffin, Deseret Information
The expertise of freedom just isn't at all times considered one of pleasure.
As we learn in Exodus, the wandering youngsters of Israel had been deeply sad and consistently voiced their displeasure with their lot. At present, they maintain up a mirror to us.
After we don’t get what we would like straight away, we moan like they did. When issues appear to threaten our sense of well-being, we fear, fairly than pray and belief. We scream to be understood whilst we refuse to grasp others.
The season of Lent — the time of reflection and penitence main as much as Easter — makes us face these and different uncomfortable info: that again and again we're ungrateful and self-concerned, and that our capability to deceive ourselves and our failure to be taught self-awareness is sort of infinite.
To be actually, deeply and completely human, we should be reminded that our tradition’s obsession with private pleasure isn’t a solution to settle into the fullness of life that's our future as youngsters of God.
Within the wilderness, how would possibly we strike the rock, as Moses did, in order that streams of “residing water” can cleanse, refresh and purge us, can “water us all in” to settle and make the soil fertile and good?
My guess is that this may be what Lent is for, not moping and moaning and grumbling — we're specialists in these issues already.
Throughout Lent, we're challenged to see ourselves clearly and to cease colluding with the falsehoods we stay with so simply. We discover that even a tiny little bit of self-restraint is tough, and woe betide us if we stand between one other particular person and no matter their obsession is — meals or drink, vanity, or no matter. I believe that's the reason folks react so viscerally after they encounter missionaries inviting us to return residence to God, or to let go of existence which are damaging. They know that responding will likely be pricey.
Lent, paradoxically, can also be about our human power to see the complete image of the messes we get ourselves into. Lent’s austerity is worried with reducing off the feeding of our ego and obsessions by numerous small abstinences. That's exhausting: a tiny grain of struggling, perhaps, in comparison with what others should cope with, however struggling nonetheless. It’s a possibility to ponder the mighty surprise to which our Heavenly Father invitations us: to make use of our company to co-create with God and his Son one thing fantastic, one thing true — to co-redeem as a part of the Son’s infinite atonement, and settle for the accountability of bearing struggling maturely, gently and correctly. That may be how we settle into our personal promised land.
C.S. Lewis famously mentioned that ache is “God’s megaphone to a deaf world.” Nobody likes ache. But in Paul’s letter to the Romans, he insists that it's struggling that results in endurance, and that ache and struggling, removed from being meaningless, builds character, which is the muse for hope.
The difficulty is that struggling and ache are not often on our wishlists. So is there a method of understanding the optimistic position of struggling with out collapsing into religious masochism?
I do know an exquisite Christian lady, a nun who's in her 90s. Earlier than changing into a nun, she was a midwife on the South Coast of England within the Fifties. Wanting again to these days, she is grateful for that point of bringing lives into their mortal journey, however typically she wonders what she has accomplished since these fantastic days. She is comfy and effectively cared-for, however conscious of her diminishing power. I need to inform her that she could be very a lot a religious midwife to me, and that I at all times come away from our common conferences infinitely refreshed and way more conscious of the religious panorama I need to journey by.
My buddy has come to see that her moments of doubt and melancholy — which she typically feels are a present from our Heavenly Father — are moments that set up religious solidarity with our brothers and sisters, and he or she is grateful for this. The reward of clever empathy and solidarity is a piece of the Holy Spirit, whereby we will stand within the ache and worry of others.
This reward of vivid consciousness is, I believe, what Lent is actually about. We journey with out anesthetics and see and know ache and struggling, with a purpose to be struck like rocks within the wilderness to supply flowing, residing water for one another.
A waterless wilderness is a fearsome state. In Exodus, Moses, in exasperation, strikes the rock and renewing water flows. I consider the surprise of the Bridal Veil Falls on the Wasatch Entrance, and the way such a sight may need impressed the Latter-day Saints of generations previous of their Deseret Zion.
That, too, is what Lent is about. Dealing with down the smug, self-serving garbage which places us on the middle of our universe, and as a substitute putting the life-giving rock, and discovering the Dwelling Water, the Bread of Heaven, Jesus Christ. He proclaims to all of us: “I lengthy in your firm, and I'll spend myself fully so that you can develop and to alter.”
Amen to such a Lenten quick!
Andrew Teal is fellow and chaplain of Pembroke School within the College of Oxford in England the place he additionally teaches theology. He's a daily attender on the Oxford 1 Ward and loves The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He will likely be giving the graduation tackle at BYU Provo in April of this 12 months, when he may also be receiving an honorary doctorate of schooling and doctorate in Christian service.