One of the things that worries me about Lent is how much I like it. It is OK to like Lent, strange, but OK to like Lent if you like it for the right reasons. If you like it, as I do, cause you get to wear beautiful purple damask, that's OK, if you like Lent cause you love hearing the Great Litany that's even stranger, but that's OK too. If you like Lent cause it gives you a breather, a break, from more elaborate liturgies, that's OK. I personally can't picture EVER wanting a break from elaboration, but some people do. If you like Lent because it is a welcome change of pace, that is OK.

But . . . if you like Lent because you love your own sense of wretchedness, adore your own unworthiness, and are really keen to launch a huge effort to do something about all that, fix up everything that is out of whack in your life, if you love Lent cause you're allowed to carry on like that, supposed, to carry on like that, then it is not OK, it is strange, it is spiritually dangerous, it theologically wrong.

Among the things that I feel I do best in this life are: feeling guilty, feeling ashamed, feeling unworthy. Lent seems to camouflage the serious spiritual danger I am in when I allow such feelings to linger and flourish. Lent seems to encourage those feelings.

I say seems.

Well, Lent doesn't actually. It is only a badly misunderstood Lent that supports this strange, perverse, misguided approach to spiritual life. Only a caricature of Lent that gives the seal of approval to behavior, thoughts, feelings that the Gospel, the Church, tries at other times to nudge us away from all the time.

When we are being really honest, don't we have to admit that we love to think that there is something that we can do, should do, must do in this relationship we have with God? I love to feel that there is some great part I must play to enhance it. I love to feel that I can insist, contrary to God's opinion, that I am a miserable wretch, unmindful of his love, and no longer worthy to be called his Son, but that I will do better in the future and so be less unworthy. A misunderstood Lent lets me give free reign to those feelings that my baptism has outlawed.

I want a good relationship with God, want one and need one, and if I have such a relationship and can show that it is the result my good efforts, my prayer, fasting, and self-denial, well then, I am really pretty pleased.

But that is the opposite what a good and holy Lent is all about. Lent is insistent in its call to spiritual honesty, its unrelenting determination to force me to face the facts of my salvation, the nature of my relationship with God.

Lent is a time for self-sacrifice. Lent is a time for greater devotion. Lent is a time for a renewed and re-invigorated commitment to do good and not simply to intend it. Lent is a time for self-denial and reflection, a time especially to press on with what should be our continual concern to examine our hearts and minds and seek fresh awareness of the grace available to amend what is disordered in our lives.

But it is above all, it is a time to prepare with joy for the Paschal Feast, for the Easter joy that is in store. A time to regain the insight of what God is doing for me, rather than what I think I am doing for God.

Lent is simply and only a time to clean and sweep and clear away the debris - those distractions and the diversions that obscure the working of God in our lives. It must never be a time to add to all of those spiritual distractions with a lot of spiritual fussing about.

Lent does not intend us to get things right in our relationship with God. Lent doesn't do that, we don't do that, God does that. Lent does intend us to examine our side of the relationship that God has graciously established with us, and eliminate those things that have gotten in the way of God's initiatives in us. Lent is not a time to seek to control or correct or modify any of our destructive patterns, our faithless fears, our debilitating obsessions. It is a time for us to examine them, to discover them, to identify them, and then to open our lives to the power of God's grace at work in us, at work on those problems, at work through the great times and the disasters.

Above all, Lent is not a time to prepare ourselves to be worthy by our efforts, no matter how devout, worthy to claim as by right, by dint of our Lenten heroism, the unearned, unmerited, undeserved gift of the Easter glory. It is a time to make all the necessary preparations to clear our minds and hearts and lives of those self-indulgent characteristics that obscure and divert the process of grace in our lives.

None of what we do in Lent can possibly accomplish any good. What we must seek is to give up those things that will sabotage God from accomplishing the good that he intends, and that only he can bring to pass.