1st Sunday of Lent – 26 February 2023
Some years ago, the actor Sean Penn produced one of the most extraordinary films I have ever watched, “Into the Wild.” The film is based on the true story of 22-year-old Christopher McCandless who leaves his family and journeys as an itinerant across the United States, finally achieving his aspiration to experience the vastness of the Alaskan wilderness. The journey was not simply an exercise of the American pioneering spirit, as it was an exploration of the experience of isolation. The geographical isolation in which McCandless immerses himself is a mirror of the psychological isolation in which he is entrapped.
For Christopher, the isolation becomes toxic. There is, however, a fragile moment of redemption for him that exposes his self-sufficiency as ultimately illusory. It comes just before his death which he suffers alone out in the Alaskan wilderness because of mistakenly eating a poisonous plant. Almost as he is dying, he manages to scribble in his journal, “All true happiness is shared.” Throughout his pilgrimage across the States to Alaska he had sought to find happiness completely on his own, and his story is a litany of the various relationships which have sought to enter his life but which he has rejected in one way or another. Yet, just before his death he realizes that happiness is something that can only be discovered in a life lived with others. “All true happiness is shared.”
This is the lesson that each of us must learn through our life. The basic temptation with which Jesus wrestles in his own wilderness as recounted in the gospel today, and by which each of us is seduced, is the temptation of self-sufficiency – a self-sufficiency created by the illusion of invulnerability, autonomy and control. It is the temptation at the heart of human nature. The season of Lent is given us to remind ourselves of the essential truth that we need something, someone, more than ourselves, outside of ourselves, beyond ourselves.
The paradox in all this, however, is that it is in solitude that we realize this. Jesus enters the solitude of the desert and there confronts the temptation of self-sufficiency.
The season of Lent and the metaphor of the desert go hand in hand. Lent calls us into the desert – as Pronzata suggests, not the desert of sand but rather the desert of whatever strips away the illusions we have of ourselves: the wilderness of our grief, the wilderness of our waiting, the wilderness of our disappointments. We don’t have to create experiences of the desert. Rather, the genuine deserts of our life find us in all those experiences which lead us home to ourselves – not as we would like to be, but just as we are – without pretense, without presumption, without projection. Solitude comes to us in those experiences which speak of our loneliness, even in a crowd. We experience ourselves as misunderstood. We cannot communicate to others as we would like. We feel a distance between ourselves and those for whom we care. We confront the mistakes that we have made in our life. We battle with depression in one form or another.
However, it might present itself to us – in our sickness, in our failure, in our discouragement – solitude, as our unavoidable loneliness, strips us of the illusions that we can entertain about our self. are. That is why we shy from the demand of solitude and the thought of loneliness. Far better to lose ourselves in a hundred and one different ways rather than face ourselves. And so, we drown out the solitude in our life by relentless chatter and a thousand and one distractions. Lent calls us to take these deserts of our life – however they present to us – with seriousness such that we might become freer from the burden of pretense, of presumption and projection.
The deserts of our life most significantly bear within them a radical invitation: something is called to die, in order that something might live. We die to the illusions we have of ourselves; we rise to the freedom the truth about ourselves enables. We are invited to let go of all the external ways by which we measure our value, our esteem, our success. We are called to come internally into ourselves with honesty, acceptance and possibility. In so doing we die to our defenses, our denials and delusions and rise to hear that which makes us able to be more open, more attentive, more receptive. Jesus is saying to us, “Let go of trying to build yourself up by looking outwards; come home to yourself, go into yourself and discover yourself as God knows you.”
Then new life might spring forth. That is the paradoxical promise given us in the heat of our own deserts. We learn our need of something more than ourselves, provided we learn as Christopher McCandless did, “All true happiness is shared.” Unlike him, for us, may the lesson not be learnt before it is too late.
