A FIGHT IN THE DESERT

“Some people living in the world asked me: ‘How can we lead the solitary life?’ I replied to them: ‘Do all the good you can; do not speak evil of anyone; be content. If you behave in this way, you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ”—Abba John of the Ladder

We follow Jesus into the desert for Lent: forty days, then we leave. The men and women who’ve stayed there live the Lenten struggle year-round. Abba John condenses the wisdom of those who remain, to those of us who don’t, into a few short words. “Do good to all, speak evil of none, be content.”

The Lord Jesus was even more succinct: “Be perfect.”

Okay.

And that means…?

We become what we do. God made us—not just generically, but personally. “Before I formed you in the womb,” God said to Jeremiah the Prophet, “I knew you.” Every human being, each soul, is formed by God, an individual creation. We come into this world of beauty and corruption, good and evil, kindness and cruelty: it forms us, too. And from all this, we form ourselves. We chose who and how to be; who we are.

Yes, there’s more to it than that. Much of who we are we didn't create. The current—and boring—homosexual controversy about “nature versus nurture” is the same old question posed yet again: "Given that I didn't create the world into which I was born, can I really be held responsible for who I am?"

The short answer, the Lenten answer, is “yes.”

Yes, regardless of all the extenuating circumstances I can march out to show I did this for that reason and blah, blah, blah. “Without temptation,” Abba Evgrius says, “there is no salvation.” We all know people whose lives are little more than a string of excuses and indulgences. There’s no challenge, nobility or heroism to such lives. You’ve been created for more. You and I were made for a fight.

In each of us there’s One Great Fight of our lives. We fight it from life’s beginning to its end, over and over. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t.

My problem with this is that I usually mistake the enemy. I think it’s you, or the people who work in the driver’s license office, or “the whole, stinkin’ system.” But all the time I’m chaffing against somebody else, I’m the problem.

Lent comes around every year to gently prod us in the right direction. It reminds us Who made us, and the reason He did and what we should do now. Then, like a good coach, Lent says “If you want a real fight, here’s the enemy,” and pushes us into the ring with ourselves.

My One Great Fight is with me. The Fight is between “what I was made to be,” versus “what I’ve become.” What are my punches, what’s my strategy?

My right is “do good to all.” My left is “speak ill of none.” My footwork is “be content.”

Do this, Abba John says, and the Fight is yours.