Sunday/Temptation

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

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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)

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Sunday/Temptation

First Sunday of Lent

Today's gospel is The Temptation in the Desert. Christ is asked by the Devil to change stone into bread, is offered dominion over the earth, and is offered the opportunity to summon angels. The temptation of God is unsettling even if we can rationalize it under Christ's duality. This event has been translated as the temptation of Israel but there is a peculiarity here that does not go away: Who is Christ proving Himself to? He is not being asked to change stone to bread because He is hungry but to prove He can do it. Ditto the display of throwing Himself from the precipice. These are displays of proof, confirmation of His divinity. And, as Christ does not need the Devil for dominion, one thinks the Devil is superfluous.

What the devil is going on?

What this really looks like is a heavenly internal debate (and a joy to the Manichees): "I could do it this way but won't. This way but won't. Nor this way." 

But Christ is not being asked by the Devil for proof.

The Devil is us.