1st Sunday in Lent

Some of you may know of the Pacific island just of the coast of Chile, known as Easter Island, which is known for its curious collection of great big stone statues, called moai that are dotted all over the island, numbering more than 887. What puzzled scholars for a long time was how these statues were erected and transported. They calculated that each statue required as many as 500 men to transport them and at least 40 logs for each statue. What was baffling was that Easter Island has no trees. Eventually the mystery was solved when archeological evidence proved that the island was once covered with an abundance of forests. Historians now speculate that the Easter Islanders became so obsessed with their project of erecting these moai, each generation trying to outdo the last generation in the number of moai that they were able to construct that they ended up cutting down all their trees. Cutting down all their trees eventually lead to the ecological collapse of their island and severely curtailed the human population that the island was able to support.

The moral of this story is echoed in the narrative of the flood from the book of Genesis, the tail end of which we hear in our first reading today. This is not a story that is unique to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It was actually a very ancient myth that floated around the various cultures and peoples of ancient Mesopotamia. The basic thrust of the story is to illustrate that when we as humans fail to respect God’s laws, we end up upsetting the balance of nature, which instead of being our friend, now becomes our enemy. Modern climate science reinforces this lesson: namely that the increased devastation and frequency of cyclones and flooding they give rise to is being caused by our human activity – our reckless clearing of forests and burning of greenhouse gases. Our rapacious industrialization and pursuit of profit at all costs is pushing our planet to the verge of collapse. The systems that regulate our climate are out of kilter and are heading for a tipping point, beyond which our planet will not be able to recover.

Our readings today contain not only a warning but also the solution. They present us with a stark contrast in two landscapes and weather systems that I think can inform our experience of Lent. On the one hand our first reading presents us with a flooded landscape, while our Gospel depicts Jesus moving into the desert, a landscape characterized and shaped by a severe lack of water. These two landscapes symbolize two very different spiritual states of being that revolve around the central motif of water as the symbol of life. The flood symbolizes what happens when we get carried away; when we try to drink in too much of life and end up harming ourselves and our environment. The desert on the other hand represents and absence of stimulation, and the resultant emptiness that ensues. Jesus’ journey into the desert teaches us that if we are to know how to drink our fill of life, we must have intermittent periods of emptiness – where we rely solely on God to fill us up. The desert is what helps us appreciate the good things in life in moderation and enjoins on us the virtue of temperance.

Our ancestors knew this lesson well. Living and being absolutely dependent on nature as they did, they had to attune themselves to the cycles of Mother Nature: of boom and bust, of droughts and floods, of winter and summer. Not every time in the year was a time of plenty, there were cycles of scarcity. In contrast, our modern industrialized economies have allowed us to ensure an uninterrupted supply of as much food as we want to eat. Now there is much to celebrate in these advances, and certainly we still have a way to go in the developing world to ensure that all are able to be adequately nourished by the food that the world grows. However, I think that our global supply chains that enable us to eat fruit and vegetables in and out of season deprive us of the opportunity to let our lives be influenced by the great cycles of nature, the cycles of bounty and scarcity.

It is appropriate that we remember that the fasting of Lent likely made practical sense in the past, when food supplies were limited. On any given day, a town’s marketplace had staples for a day or maybe two. Gluttons with money could easily deprive others of necessities. If all were to eat, all had to exercise restraint. In the springtime especially, when winter stores were depleted but new crops had not matured, fasting was necessary. Springtime hunger was part of the natural order of life. Indeed the very word Lent comes from an Old English word meaning spring-time. We can see how the fasting in Lent was part of appropriating the divine pedagogy that God has inscribed in Nature. If even Jesus, the Son of God bowed to this divine pedagogy, who are we to claim that it is not necessary for us?

There is therefore a certain hubris to the modern spirit that boastfully proclaims human’s domination of the land, where we are even able to make the desert sprout forth crops. The modern spirit proclaims that we no longer have any need for the desert – we have conquered it. We no longer need to be dependent on the cycles of nature, our technology allows us to circumvent the cycles of scarcity and bounty, so that we can live in perpetual bounty. The problem with this is that we as human beings were not made to be in a perpetual state of satiety – it just isn’t spiritually healthy. Our dependence on nature and the cycles of nature are a direct expression of our absolute dependence on our Creator. This is why fasting in Lent is such an important practice, because it keeps us in this state of dependence: an empty, patient trust in our Creator who alone can fill the hole that dwells in each of us.

Questions for reflection:

1. In what ways can I reduce my ecological footprint, and walk more lightly on the planet, conserving precious resources for generations to come?
2. When I feel the urge to consume, to fill myself up to the brim, what are the practices that help me to resist this urge?
3. Where is my desert, the place that I really feel I can disconnect from it all and be comfortable being empty?