Easter is at the centre of the liturgical practice and faith of Christianity. It is the time to remember and to celebrate that we are in fact immortal spiritual beings - and not just intelligent animals with a fixed life-span.
The first of the seven readings of the traditional Easter Vigil is the Genesis story of creation where we are reminded that "God created humankind in his image." (Gn 1:27)
That is the point of Easter: we are created in God's image as immortal spiritual beings, and Jesus demonstrated that when he rose from the dead and appeared to people (then and still now) as a resurrected person. That is the point of Easter.
So what is the point of Lent?
Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday next week, is a very old tradition. For many people it has been captured by the idea that really we are not immortal spiritual people created in God's image. For those people Lent is a time to make ourselves worthy (through acts of penance, prayer and giving) to become immortal spiritual people created in the Creator's image.
But we can reframe that idea and see a more clear purpose.
We may be immortal spiritual beings created in God's image, but the immediacy of our physical lives takes over and we spend most of our time worrying about the physical threats and dangers we face. Lent can be a time when we go back to basics and remind ourselves that we are in fact spiritual beings with an umbilical cord rooted in our Creator.
We can work for seven weeks to put our physical needs where they belong - by putting things right and giving up some of our little luxuries, by talking daily to our God, and by giving our stuff and money away to remind us that, in fact, we don't need it all!
If we don't do that, we drift more and more deeply into the physical world, until in the end we cannot conceive of any other.
No comments:
Post a Comment