Oscar Wilde famously said he could resist
anything except temptation. It tends to
be true for a lot of people, and for most of us some of the time. The Season of Lent usually begins with the
classic story of Jesus’s temptations in the desert – this year in Matthew’s
account -- and whatever we make of that event, we must be careful not to
trivialize it with silliness about trite Lenten disciplines. Lent is not about being tempted to go
shopping or to eat chocolate.
Jesus is tempted by the Devil – and we will
never get this story if we leave our imaginations at home – first to turn
stones into bread because he is hungry.
And Jesus replies: We do not live by bread alone, but by every
word that comes from the mouth of God.
“Bread” here suggests not only food, but all material dependency and
satisfaction. It is looking for
happiness by spending and consumption, deriving worth from owning, possessing,
controlling, as though these things are all self-evidently good. And Jesus says, we don’t live that way.
The second temptation invites Jesus to become a
wonder, a celebrity, by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple – the angels will bear you up. He replies with another quotation: Do not
put the Lord your God to the test. The power which would allegedly keep him safe
in such a stunt, even if it did, would be actually an abuse of power, a
distortion of our proper relationship to the world. Magic is not part of our faith, nor does it
need to be. The creation is not there to
be manipulated and used for our own entertainment -- and God does not exist to
keep us somehow especially safe. That is
the last thing some Christians will ever realize.
Thirdly, Jesus refuses the Devil’s invitation
to fall down and worship him: You will worship the Lord your God; you will
serve only him. Jesus refuses the
temptation to illusion and falsehood, to dreamworld, fantasy land, leading
inevitably to limitation, bondage and addiction. It is too easy to consent to lies, to
illusion – in the words of G K Chesterton, all that terror
teaches, lies of tongue and pen, all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men.
If it is not true and free, and breathing clean air, it is not of God. (I wrote that paragraph after watching ten
minutes of the Academy Oscar movie awards.)
We come to our contemplative
prayer always in the context of our world in which we live. And that world is possessed – I use the word
deliberately – by all the factors which assailed Jesus in the desert. There is the desperate need to find happiness
in owning and consuming. There is the reluctance
to see ourselves for what we are, frail and mortal, in T S Eliot’s words, susceptible to nervous shock. Our culture turns readily to illusion, to
diversions, to drugs, mindless pursuits, to feel better or safe. We come from a world seething with lies and
half-truths, deceit and violence.
My point is that we are not exempt
from any of this, because these are things we hear and read, and which we brush
against over the years in the lives of our families and friends. The seeds of some of it may linger within our
own selves. All of this, or its
possibility, drapes around us when we come to be still and silent. And it is into that confusion, along with all
the good and positive factors, that we introduce the gentle rhythm of the
mantra, the word or phrase we have chosen, which draws our attention to the
centre, to God, who is always paying attention.
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