Season of Life

"Season of Life"
Lent 2009 – Day 2 (Feb 26)

By Deshi Ramadhani, SJ

If you look around, it is easy to understand that human beings will do everything possible to stay alive. Achievements in medical treatments, for example, have indeed been successful to avoid many possible deaths. Take any example of health problem, and imagine what would have happened if this problem had occurred years ago. What inevitably led people to die in the past has become “an easy case” for today’s physician. Yes, today, we know a lot more about avoiding death.

Unfortunately, this is not automatically the case with another kind of death: a spiritual death. When the people of Israel were about to enter the Promised Land, they were strongly reminded by their leader, Moses, to choose life, not death. In the Hebrew mind of the time, this death means both physical and spiritual. It is physical, because it can literally entail life-threatening dangers, such as wars or plagues. Yet, it is also (and more importantly) spiritual. Here death means being cut off from God, the true and the only source of life.

Here lies the difficulty with sin. When we sin, we are physically still alive. So what’s the big deal? If I know with my whole being that sin leads to death, I would avoid it at all cost. Yet, in my daily life, sinning does not really kill me. Even if last night you have been unfaithful to your spouse, there was no lightning that stroke you to death. You can still breathe and put on a nice mask when you meet your spouse at breakfast this morning. Our society is in need of sincere fear of spiritual death.

When you pretend as if everything is all right, you actually deny your very existence. You train your mind to live as someone else, not the real you. Continue to do this, and guess what happens? You are accustomed to feel and think that you are indeed that someone else. More poignantly, you train yourself to “not-really-exist.” In other words, you train yourself to live as a dead person. And indeed, you are dead spiritually. Any uneasiness you feel when you wake up in the morning is a clear indicator that something is not right. That is a sign of your spiritual death.

Jesus knows perfectly our inability to feel in our own flesh the spiritual death caused by our sins. For this reason, He will embrace that physical death for us so that we are spared from the terrible spiritual death. The Son of Man died physically for you and me. We don’t need to go that far because as of today all we need is to get in touch with our spiritual death.

Lent is indeed a joyful season, as the first Lent Eucharistic Preface loudly proclaims. It is joyful, because it is the season of gaining back our life, not only our spiritual life, but more importantly our divine life in Christ. Lent is a joyful season to train your mind to choose Christ so that you may live.