Jesus went
out into the desert, a desert a lot like ours,
to get his heart straight with God.
I have been
on long desert retreats,
but these days mostly I just drive
through the desert
on my way from church to
church.
The office
staff always feel sorry for me
because of all the hours of driving alone in the desert.
They don’t
believe me when I tell them that I like it.
There’s a
lot of geology out there – biology too.
And the
light falls at different angles at different times of day
and in the different seasons.
It is a
spiritual retreat for me to drive all day in the desert
“in solitude, where we are least
alone” to quote Lord Byron.
I find God
out there.
My family
worries about me though.
That’s
partly my fault.
I have told
them stories of terrorist attacks on my car
by kamikaze deer,
aerial assaults by suicide bomber
hawks,
and -- worst of all – bovine roadblocks
by three cows standing
stolidly
broadside across both
lanes.
Like Jesus I
am with the wild beasts.
I’ve
actually never had a serious mishap.
The only
wild beast that ever damaged my car
enough to go to the body shop was
not a deer, cow, elk, or bear.
It was an
enormous mutant jackrabbit.
Still they
worry.
One year, my
elder daughter sent me a set of deer whistles,
to scare the wild beasts out of my
path.
There’s a
hot controversy about whether they work or not.
I don’t
know, but my daughter gave them to me so I installed them
as directed on the front of my Ford.
The premise
of the deer whistle is that the wind blows through it
to make the sound that scares the
animals.
The
interesting thing was the maintenance instructions.
The
maintenance issue is about smaller wild beasts, to wit: bugs
– the same ones that splatter our
windshields and grills
are apt to die in the
deer whistle and clog it up,
block
the wind tunnel.
No wind – no
whistle.
So it is
necessary, from time to time, to clean the bugs
out of the whistle.
And that
brings us to this first Sunday of Lent.
The Persian
poet Rumi said the human being is a flute
which makes divine music when the
breath of God
blows through.
God breathes
through us so that we speak, act, and move
with a grace like music – music that
attracts people,
that draws them – not to
our personalities – but to God.
Spirit means
breath or wind.
Spirit isn’t
a feeling we have or something we hold onto.
Spirit is
God blowing through our hearts.
All of which
brings us back to deer whistles, bugs, and Lent.
Like the
deer whistle, the spiritual passageway in us can get blocked.
The bugs
that choke off our spiritual air passage, we call sin.
Sins are not
just bad decisions.
Sin is
something that blocks God out of our souls
and keeps us from sharing God out
into our world.
Sin blocks
the flow of God’s spirit through us
like bugs block the wind from a deer
whistle.
That’s a
poetic way to put it. Let me explain.
Sin is a
pattern or habit of feeling, thinking, or acting
that keeps us from attuning our
lives to God.
Each new
situation is a fresh encounter with God.
But fixed
habits of feeling, thinking, and acting
make us oblivious to the wonder of
God new in each moment.
Every
feeling, thought, and action happens in the brain
when an electrical impulse fires
from one nerve cell to the next.
“What fires together wires
together.”
That means
repeating the same patterns over and over
can trap us in a rat maze inside our
own heads.
We get
patterns of feeling, thinking, and acting
hardwired into our very bodies.
New things happen
all the time,
but we keep having the same old
experiences.
We are deaf,
numb, and blind to anything new.
We are deaf,
numb, and blind to God.
These habits
that shut God out are the bugs.
Lent is the
time for a spring-cleaning of our hearts,
to open up a passageway for God.
There are as
many kinds of sin as there are bugs
along the highway.
But you can
group them in categories.
In the 4th
Century, Evagrius of Pontus
became an expert on sin the same way Jesus did.
He spent
years as a hermit in the desert
and found every sin imaginable right
inside himself.
He grouped
the sins into three categories
corresponding to Jesus’ 3
temptations in the desert.
Turning
stones into bread he called appetitive sin.
There are
several in that file. One of them is gluttony.
But gluttony isn’t just about food.
Its’ the
anxious craving to have more and more – of anything.
It’s the
fear that we can never have enough.
could keep us from seeing what we’ve
got
because our eyes are
scanning the horizon?
Psalm 78
tells how the people complained of hunger in the desert
and blamed God for their trouble,
so God miraculously fed them with
meat and the bread of angels.
The Psalmist
then writes this brilliant line,
“But they did not stop their craving
though the food was still in their mouths.”
The habit of
craving denies us the peace of ever saying,
“This is enough. Thank you.”
Evagrius
said the temptation to rule the world
represents the category of
relational sins.
These are
habits of feeling about others like sadness or anger.
Having the
feelings is natural.
Getting
stuck in them is the danger.
I find the
spiritual airshafts of many a church
clogged with old grudges, grievances, and nostalgias.
Having
feelings is human and good.
When the
feelings have us, they turn into bugs.
The
temptation to work impressive miracles
Evagrius said represents the sins he
called athletic.
He meant
they had to do with achievements.
His personal
favorite sin was “vainglory.”
Dr. Samuel
Johnson defined “vainglory” as
“the vain attempt to fill the minds
of others with oneself.”
It is an
extremely frustrating sin,
because no matter what we do
we can never occupy as much space in
someone else’s mind
as they occupy in it
themselves.
We will
always be playing second fiddle.
They are
just three examples to invite your reflection
on what it is in you that keeps God’s breath
from blowing through you like Rumi’s
flute,
the way it blew through
Jesus.
Is it a
grudge, an addiction, a fear, or a shame?
Lent is the
time to find it, name it, and give it over to God.
This calls
for a shift in our prayer.
Many of us
usually pray that God will change our outer circumstances
or that God will change other
people.
In Lent, we ask
God to change us.
Invite Jesus
to cast out whatever is in you
that is less than your true heart,
less than your very soul.
Invite Jesus
to set you free to be who God made you to be,
a perfect flute playing a divine
melody
to delight the world.
