Fr Joshan Rodrigues –
My fortieth birthday just a few short months ago, conjured up within me a feeling of deep introspection. Birthdays are a time of celebration, but here I was, pensive and troubled even. I perceived 40 as being the fence between youthful maturity and an adult rigour. I was now passing from the first half to the second half of my life, and the anxiousness sprung more from looking back at the last forty years of my life that had ebbed by with the passage of time…rapidly I must say. True, I had ticked a number of boxes in terms of the goals that I set myself a number of years ago, there was a lot to show for…but what I thought had remained unfinished and yet unaccomplished, stood like an enormous mountain looming large in front of me. There was so much more to do in the way of contributing towards meaningful and life-altering projects that would enable me to say with confidence in the future that my priesthood had in fact been of useful service to the Kingdom of God.
As I know look forward to the onset of Ash Wednesday in a few days from now, I have a feeling that this year around, lent is going to be a much more pensive and reflective experience for me personally. I have 40 days to think about the last 40 years of my life, and at the same time, reflect on the 40 years ahead with fear and trembling. Worldly accessories and superficial illuminations have now faded away, and parting through the rubble of the chaos of daily life and temporal achievements, I see God on the other side beckoning me to come spend some time with Him, praying for the gift of real treasure, rather than the shine of an ephemeral applause.
Speaking of rubble, the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria can also become for us an occasion to think about the temporality of our human existence (“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”). It is sobering to confront the prospect of one’s own morality. Especially as we live in a culture that tells us if we maintain a strict diet, if we stockpile money, if we track our steps, if we master life… we can cheat death. In our heart of hearts, however, we know quite simply this isn’t true. In the act of receiving ashes, we are called to bare our whole selves to God — our beautiful, messy, sinful selves. There is no hiding behind veiled words or illusive concepts. Ash Wednesday cuts through all of that.
Aerial photographs show us huge tent cities of white set up around Turkey to accommodate the thousands that have been rendered homeless. This takes me back to the Israelites who wandered for 40 years in the wilderness, and lived in tents as made their way from place to place. Jesus’ sojourn of 40 days in the desert after his baptism, was his way of reliving that period in Israelite history, when the chosen people were at the mercy of Yahweh and put their faith and trust in Him (of course they did have their failings along the way). Concrete buildings and cities give us a false sense of security and personal achievement…the visible God of our lives gradually tends to ebb into the background in the face of daily onslaught of worldly expectations and a pressure to perform. Lent is a time to leave our concrete dwellings (figuratively speaking) and to live a more rural and natural life, with God and in God, rediscovering the joy of being utterly dependent on Him and deepening our faith in Him.
These forty days of Lent are questioning: This question is not far from the one Jesus confronts in the desert: forty days to decide what he wants to be, what kind of Messiah he will be. There were many different hopes placed on the figure of the Messiah and now Jesus is pushed, forced by the Spirit to decide for himself.
Deciding for oneself is always a battle, a battle in which we confront contrasting desires: our personal hopes often contrast with the expectations of those around us and certain illusions are often in conflict with what reality has to tell us. This is the battle that I certainly face on a daily basis: my personal ambitions and style of working in contrast with the type of person that God wants me to be, and both of these are confronted by the expectations of the people I serve.
As it so often happens in life, I find myself alone at these times. It can feel like being in a desert, without points of reference, abandoned and without securities. But one can also reach out to God with great clarity and perception during the desert moments. For Israel, the desert was a place of fear, a place where their very fears were transformed in serpents, a place of hunger and thirst, a place of idolatry. And yet the desert was also the place of intimate encounter with God, a place of relationship, the place of the Covenant and the Law. All of these things happen in the desert that is our life.
Jesus was confronted with temptations while in the desert. We often clothe the word ‘temptation’ with vulgar connotations but a closer look reveals that temptations can simply be the ordinary things of life that seem harmless and even justified. Most often, temptation doesn’t come knocking at our door with a flash of light and smoke, but slyly in the daily events of our life without even raising our antennas. In moments like this, the choices we make show who we truly are. This is also the meaning of the verb “to tempt,” peirazo in Greek used by Luke.
Just as with Adam at the beginning of Genesis, so with Jesus: the first temptation has to do with eating, a normal daily activity, almost trivial in its normalness. In fact, the temptation itself is no extraordinary event and relates to the very course of life.
Eating is a metaphor for our relationship with the world. When we eat, we introduce into our bodies a part of the world. To eat is to enter into a relationship with what that which is outside of us. This is why the way we eat speaks to the way we live with regard to the exterior world: some devour it thinking only in themselves, others nourish themselves from it reasonably, other reject it entirely! The way in which we decide to eat the world reveals something about who we are.
Refusing to turn the stones into bread and accepting the weight of his hungry, Jesus says something about who he is. There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with it, rather it would have been reasonable after forty days of fasting, but Jesus refuses the logic privilege: his power is for serving, it is to be shared, it is not to serve himself.
Temptation follows us our entire lives and returns in the moment when we are weakest: that is the opportune moment, the passion and the cross. When we are suffering, that disquieting voice returns to our minds from our childhood: think only in yourself, think of yourself first!
That’s the way we’ve been educated. The world has brought us up to believe that the most important thing is to save oneself, to think about oneself. This temptation returns to Jesus in his final moments of passion and cross in the form of temptations of self-sufficiency, of self-salvation: come down from the Cross if you are the Son of God, save yourself!
And once again we show who we truly are every time we have had to choose between our egoism – our thirst for power, our rightful claims, even when they’re comprehensible – and a greater good.
My prayer for me and for you, is that this Ash Wednesday, God may pull us away to Himself, that we may temporarily leave our meanderings in this world, to spend some meaningful, fulfilling and life-changing time with the only treasure that can ever satisfy our hunger…God Himself.
Fr Joshan Rodrigues is the Managing Editor of The Examiner, Catholic Newsweekly of the Archdiocese of Bombay. He is an alumnus of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome in Institutional and Social Communications. He has done brief stints with the DeSales Media Group in Brooklyn, New York and Communications Office of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales, London. He frequently blogs on faith and culture on his wonderful blog: ‘Musings in Catholic Land’
Lovely Read as usual Father…..your words are truly thought provoking 🙏