What Does God Want?

Historically for me Lent always carried this specter of some need to reach a misery quota so that God would be happy with me, or so that I could grow, or so that somehow good things could come of it. Or, I figured God wants prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, so I'll do those things, not really grasping any interior depth to them, but I'll do them because that's what God wants. 

This year, the Lord is helping me to glimpse some interior depth on the "why" question involved here -- always my favorite one to ask. 

At the core, God wants us to embrace and live in our own human dignity. It is His creation. Our difficulty is that so much clutters us, so many layers accrue over our souls, and we get satisfied with much less, with the things we create for ourselves and call our worth. And when and if we do touch the raw parts of our hearts, where our dignity resides, we often respond negatively: kicking, beating, shutting out, starving off, or otherwise incapacitating and silencing.

So we can spend Lent either rearranging our false worth, or doing a bunch of self-harm. Yikes. What person in their right mind wouldn't give up on that?

But what God wants us for us to know ourselves the way He knows us. To pray effectively, we have to go to silence, open that dark heart, and allow the light of the Word of God to shine into us. To know God and to know ourselves, we must stand before the Word, Jesus. We must soak in the light and power of the Holy Spirit coming to us in Scripture.

Fasting has always been hardest for me to seperate from self-harm for obvious reasons. For some reason it has been hard for me to grasp that fasting entails a choice: deciding to eat or not eat in a certain way. I set aside something of mine for another person, either by giving away the food, the money, or the time that would have been entailed in my eating. In my state of hunger, I offer my emptiness to the Lord to fill. I turn my desire for food into a desire for justice. This makes me actually feel the dignity of the person next to me, and in the light of that, my own dignity as well. My dignity is not to be found in how productive I can be, how sleek and strong, but in my existence itself.

Almsgiving, living in a wasteful, affluent society, can't just be about throwing a few bucks at a cause. Almsgiving is the ability for one heart to hear the cry of another, and to answer it at one's own personal cost. I feel like our notion of job and employment have cut off many from what it means to serve others with what we have. Maybe we are given people to help, 9-5, but then the rest of our lives are for us. We have our protocols and parameters of what we do for others, and stepping out of these is unprofessional. Public and private life have firm boundaries, and those in need of help need to find the professional agency or program set up to help them, the proper way. People, in this system, lose the dignity of acting freely, of learning how to organize themselves together, to truly pool their human strengths for the common good of all. We lose our dignity when we don't know how to give to one another freely. I think of those in Poland who have opened their homes to 1-2 million Ukranian refugees. From what I saw of Poland in the month I was there, this isn't because the average Pole lives in an expansive house with luxury out the wazoo. 

Pursuing these facets of Lent personally and corporately is transformational. God wants us to be transformed in Him, because He wants to heal our interior pain and our exterior need, and to make us whole.