A LENTEN PASSAGE

[Liberal Catholic]

A LENTEN PASSAGE
by Father Thomas Keating

Lent is the season in which the church as a whole enters into an
extended retreat. Jesus went into the desert for forty days and forty
nights. The practice of Lent is a participation in Jesus, solitude,
silence, and privation.

The forty days of Lent bring into focus a long biblical tradition
beginning with the Flood in the Book of Genesis, when rain fell upon
the earth for forty days and forty nights. We read about Elijah
walking forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Mt. Horeb.
We read about the forty years that the Israelites wandered through the
desert in order to reach the Promised Land.

The biblical desert is primarily a place of purification, a place of
passage. The biblical desert is not so much a geographical location--a
place of sand, stones or sagebrush--as a process of interior
purification leading to the complete liberation from the false-self
system with its programs for happiness that cannot possibly work.

Jesus deliberately took upon himself the human condition--fragile,
broken, alienated from God and other people. A whole program of self-
centered concerns has been built up around our instinctual needs and
have become energy centers-sources of motivation around which our
emotions, thoughts, and behavior patterns circulate like planets
around the sun.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, these programs for happiness
influence our view of the world and our relationship with God, nature,
other people, and ourselves.

This is the situation that Jesus went into the desert to heal.

During Lent our work is to confront these programs for happiness and
to detach ourselves from them.

The scripture readings chosen for Lent and the example of Jesus
encourage us in this struggle for inner freedom and conversion.


Thomas Keating O.C.S.O.


[ Father Keating, a Trappist monk and Abbot is one of the Leading
Founders of The Centering Prayer Movement.]


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