My first few years of grade
school, we used an abacus to count. Then
one day in junior high, these new things called “computers” showed up. We were all very impressed by those Apple II
computers. Never mind that there were no
graphics to speak of. Never mind that
the average smartphone today has more computing power than one of those Apple
II’s. We were, back in the day, mightily
impressed.
With every year of school,
through college, seminary, and into my priesthood, computers steadily grew more
powerful. One measure of this strength,
at least one that someone like myself could understand, was the memory required
to store files, documents and pictures.
In our basic computer class, we learned that the basic unit of computer
memory is the “byte”. If you needed to
talk about these computer bytes in large quantities, you had to learn all sorts
of new metric prefixes. For example, if
a file was really large, requiring thousands of bytes, you would need to
talk about kilobytes.
But no sooner did you turn
around, and everything was being measured in megabytes, which they told
us is a million bytes. Then, the next
morning, everyone was talking about gigabytes. I lost count of how many bytes make up a
gigabyte, but it didn’t really matter, because that afternoon I heard tell of a
terabyte. And so this past
Tuesday, I found myself purchasing a “One Terabyte” hard drive. I tried to convince myself that finally I was
“with it” when it comes to computers, but in the back of my mind, I wasn’t
really convinced. Sure enough, that
evening, I read an article (online) measuring computer memory in “exabytes”,
and I resigned myself to being a fossil of the computer age.
This article was fascinating
to read, but almost depressing at the same time. The article explained that if
every image made, and every word written from the earliest civilization to the
year 2003 were converted to digital information, the total would come to five
exabytes. An exabyte is one billion
gigabytes. But in the next seven years,
from 2003 to 2010, mankind created on average the same amount of information—five exabytes—every two days.
But the rate keeps
accelerating: by next year, mankind will
produce five exabytes every ten minutes.
It’s hard to know whether it’s
the amount of information thrown at us, or the rate of
acceleration that’s more dizzying. Does
the pace of your life sometimes give you a headache? Do you ever feel that you’d enjoy a retreat
from the hectic nature of life? You
know, the word “retreat” is very interesting.
The word “retreat” has both positive and negative connotations. In a positive sense, especially when
we speak of a place as a retreat, we’re speaking of it as a place of
relaxation and rest. But when we use the
word “retreat” as a verb, it implies some sort of weakness and defeat, at least
temporarily.
Lent, as a season of our yearly
life as Christians, is a retreat in both senses, positive and
negative. I know lots of people (maybe
you’re one, also) who consider Lent to be their favorite season of the
Church Year, even more so than Christmas or Easter! That might seem strange, given that Easter
and Christmas are really more important theologically. But given life in our modern world, it’s
understandable. The effects of technology,
including instant communication, rapid travel throughout the world, and the
ability to download any fact, figure, or Facebook photo, all take their toll
on the human spirit. We think of each of
these as a boon and blessing, yet often they feel a burden. We feel a need to retreat from the
modern world, to spend time in retreat if for no other reason than to get our
bearings, and regain a sense of perspective about our life.
Lent is a retreat into the
desert. So we hear in today’s brief
Gospel. It’s only four verses: five sentences. Only the first two sentences describe Jesus’
forty days in the desert. In the first
verse we hear: “The
Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert….” Reflect on the two
Persons mentioned in this verse.
“The
Spirit” is, of course, the
Holy Spirit: the Third Person of the
Most Blessed Trinity. There are many
ways to describe the Holy Spirit. One of
the more famous is to describe the Holy Spirit as the Love of the Father for
the Son, and of the Son for the Father.
Because the Father and the Son are so like each other, because they are,
in fact, “one in being” (or in the revised translation of the
Creed, because they are “consubstantial”), their love for
each other is identical: their
reciprocal, mutual Love for each other is the Third Person of the Godhead.
It is this Love—the reciprocal,
mutual indwelling Love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father—that
“drove Jesus out into the desert.” Jesus’ love for God the
Father, and the Father’s love for Jesus, “drove Jesus out
into the desert.” That
might seem odd to say: that it was
divine Love that drove Jesus into an intensely hot, arid place where for almost
seven weeks He faced temptations from the devil? How can such a driving force be seen as Love?
One of the verses written by the
Beloved Disciple clarifies this truth.
In his first letter, St. John declares:
“In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He has
loved us, and has given us His Son as a propitiation (that is, a sacrificial
offering) for our sins.” Here is the heart of Lent and Easter: the primacy of God the Father’s Love. St. John in this verse reveals to us that before
any love of ours for God—in fact, in the face of our choice to positively reject
God’s love—God the Father made a choice to send His Son down from
Heaven, into this world of sin, in order to be a sacrificial offering
for our sins.
God the Father loves you, not in spite
of your sins, but in and through your sins. God the Father, out of love for you, sent
His Son into this world, in order to be crucified on Good Friday, so as to open
the gates of Heaven for you. For His
part, Jesus accepted in Love the mission His Father gave Him: the mission to be a sacrificial offering on
the Cross. It’s this Love—the Son’s
total acceptance of, and self-identification with, His Father’s
Love for you as a sinner—that drove Jesus into the desert.
Lent is a retreat with Jesus into
this desert. On the one hand, this is a
retreat in the negative sense, because it’s an honest admission of our human
weakness and even defeat, at least temporarily.
Several days ago, the Collect for Ash Wednesday highlighted this
truth. The newly re-translated prayer
much more faithfully sets before us the reality that our earthly fight against
sin truly is a battle. Listen to the martial
imagery in this Collect from Ash Wednesday:
“Grant,
O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting
this
campaign of Christian service,
so
that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils,
we
may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.”
This
prayer could hardly be more clear in presenting the truth that the Christian
life demands what many saints throughout the centuries have called “spiritual
warfare”.
We retreat with Jesus into the
desert because He is our Captain. He is
the Head of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ. This is the positive sense in which
Lent is a retreat. Lent is a blessed
time, even a joyful time, because here, in the desert, we are with
Jesus. It is His Presence here that
makes this time in the desert a thing of beauty.
This desert is for your soul what
fire is for gold: a purification. The love of your life is meant to be one with
God the Father’s Love, just as Jesus’ Love is one with the Father’s Love. The Holy Spirit is meant to be the driving
force of your life, driving you each day, and throughout all your
days on earth, into the missions on which the Father sends you.
