Sunday/First Sunday of Lent

 

                             Sunday/First Sunday of Lent

The first Sunday of Lent. In our disconnected world, it arrived on cat's feet. In it, Christ goes into the desert, "driven" by the Spirit.

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert,
and he remained in the desert for forty days,
tempted by Satan.
He was among wild beasts,
and the angels ministered to him.

This is a strange scene, reminiscent of Eden, where Man was one with Nature before the Fall. The temptations of food, power, and glory are, of course, those worldly motives that move all lives.

From Glanmore:

The corrugated iron growled like thunder
When March came in; then as the year turned warmer
And invalids and bulbs came up from under,
I hibernated on behind the dormer,
Staring through shaken branches at the hill,
Dissociated, like an ailing farmer
Chloroformed against things seasonal
In a reek of cigarette smoke and dropped ash.

Lent came in next, also like a lion
Sinewy and wild for discipline,
A fasted will marauding through the body;
And I taunted it with scents of nicotine
As I lit one off another, and felt rash,
And stirred in the deep litter of the study.

Seamus Heaney