The first reading for Mass in the Roman Catholic
Lectionary for today is from the Book of Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Here, Moses
sets before us the essential choice we are asked to make for Lent:
See, I have today set before you life
and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the
LORD, your God, which I am giving you today, loving the LORD, your God, and
walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and ordinances, you
will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land
you are entering to possess. If, however, your heart turns
away and you do not obey, but are led astray and bow down to other gods and
serve them, I tell you today that you will certainly perish;
you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to
enter and possess. I call heaven and earth today to witness
against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.
Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by
loving the LORD, your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him. For that
will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD
swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them.
Lent is the road we walk in Christ's footsteps
through all the small deaths required to shed the less-than-useful habits we've
acquired into at least a foretaste of the abundant life to come (cf. John
10:10). Here, at the beginning of this season, we stand at a crossroads:
the narrow road that leads to life or that nice, flat, wide, smooth road that
has a different destination (Matthew 7:13-14). Moses has pounded a signpost
in front of us with two arrows: "This way life!" and "This way
death!" Pretty definite.
The road to life is laid out according to God's
commandments, those itchy words of love that so easily chafe us when we would
rather be doing one of the "thou shalt not's"--and how inviting they
sometimes look! But Moses begins with the First Commandment, which is not
one of the ten carved on the stone tablets on Mount Sinai. It is one of
the most frequent commandments God gives in Scripture. Benedictines
recognize it immediately. It is "Listen!"
Before we make all those choices Benedict lays out
in Chapter 49 of the Rule about "devoting ourselves to prayer with tears,
to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial" and "we will add
to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and
abstinence from food or drink.... let each one deny himself some food,
drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting," let's spend time sitting
down and listening.
Listen to what experience has taught you since
last Easter about which choices further the trip along the road to life and
which ones don't. Listen to your mistakes. Listen to your good
decisions. Listen to what others have said to you when they didn't intend
to be giving you directions. Listen above all to the Voice of God
threaded through all those experiences, helping you to sort them out.
You'll be much better able to decide then what to emphasize during Lent,
what to drop from your life, what to throttle back and where to go full speed
ahead, what baggage you can leave behind at the crossroad.
We often speak of Lent as a journey.
Benedict offers us some ideas about where we are headed, as Moses does.
Blessed traveling!
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