3rd Week of Lent: What We Really Want

"Jeremiah, say to the people, 'This is what the LORD says: "'When people fall down, don't they get up again? When they discover they're on the wrong road, don't they turn back? 5 Then why do these people stay on their self-destructive path? Why do the people of Jerusalem refuse to turn back? They cling tightly to their lies and will not turn around.’” (Jeremiah 8:4-6, New Living Translation)

In our Morning Prayer, we’ve been focusing on the prophet Jeremiah this Lent. He was God’s prophet, delivering bad news to the people of Judah and Jerusalem. Their kingdom, their Temple, were about to be destroyed by their enemies. And worst of all, they had it coming, for their worship of other gods, and their leaders who put their personal happiness above the needs of the poor.

In the C.S. Lewis Bible I recently bought is this insight of Lewis’s, applied by the editors to the 8th chapter of Jeremiah: “Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted.” Doesn’t that sound like what our parents told us when we were children? Do we instinctively flinch from this now that we’re all grown up?

And how many preachers, politicians, motivational speakers, self-help gurus, try to tell us what we really want, when all they’re doing is imposing their personal experience on ours. But personal experience, by its nature, is unrepeatable. The rock group, R.E.M., may have summarized our resistance to being told what we really want when they sang, “Life is bigger than you, and you are not me.”

Yes, life is bigger than those who would tell you how to live yours. But the flip side to that truth, perhaps harder to acknowledge (and why R.E.M. didn’t mention it) is this: life is bigger than you, but life is also bigger than me. One of the purposes of Lent is to help us not to resist that truth as it sinks into our soul, that life is bigger than me.

So, when we fail to get what we want, we can learn what we really want. When we fail to get what we want, or we get it and find it doesn’t really satisfy, we have the opportunity to learn what we really wanted all along. Thus, we can find relief from the constant tension in our heads and hearts between what we think we want and what we really want.

When we accept that what we really wanted, the tension leaves and is replaced by peace, the peace of knowing that we are no governed by a despot, but a lover. May we all find the lover in what we really want this Lent.