Macky
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Really getting into it |
Location: USA
Registered: November 2008
Messages: 973
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Growing up in a Roman Catholic household, Lent was not a happy time. Mardi Gras wasn't the time of raucous abandon that it is in New Orleans and elsewhere.
It all started with Ash Wednesday when we were to carefully consider how temporary our lives were. Then there were 40 days of religious S&M. One was advised to mortify the flesh during this period. Then it all came to a climax on Good Friday, when fasting and self denial reached a frenzied pitch.
Coming from a church that burned Jews and homosexuals, the lent thing was a relatively good idea in my opinion. I'm not much of a Catholic nowadays and I'm only a nominal Christian. But I think that an institutionalized period of introspection, which Lent is meant to be, is a wholesome idea.
It's good to really stop and think about my imperfections and the work or self control or self mortification that I need to do to make myself a better person. How can I make myself be less self aggrandizing? Who am I hurting, why, and how do I cure myself of that sickness? How can I attain the humility to forget about myself and seek the greater happiness and well being of the world at large.
I read Jack Rowan's 'Story of Tim' recently. It purported to show the benefits of suffering from an S&M point of view. Judaism has it's day of atonement. The need to stop and reflect on one's actions and the impact they have on the world is not just a Catholic or even a religious thing. It's just good living.
So I'd like to start this Lent with apologies and resolutions to search out the instances and the means whereby I bring unpleasantness
to the lives of others and to rectify that.
The path to heaven doesn't lie in magic or 'imaginary friends' or in repetitive rubric. I think a lot of that is akin to Santa Claus. It's to get little children introduced in an idea (charity). As an adult I need to recognize that introspection and monitoring and controlling my actions are germane and necessary to the greater enjoyment of my own life and to the greater good of the world in which I live.
I am not always right. I am not always the best and I do not always do my best. I lack faith in others and hold them back by that, since faith is a creative force. Lack of faith in others also makes my own life smaller because it stymies opportunities for human closeness and sharing.
So lent is assuring myself that there is indeed a heaven, and cautioning myself that it is my job to help build this heaven. Because if my joy is to live for the welfare of others, and that is everyone else's joy too, then we would have a real and genuine heaven right here where we are. We would have a world of peace love and joy.
That's what Lent has become for me today. It used to be a religious thing. Now it's grown into a spiritual thing. It reminds me of the ever existing opportunity to reinvent myself. It reminds me of the fantastic opportunity I have been given to make the world a better place.
Max
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is
For brothers to dwell together in unity!
Ps 133:1 NASB
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