The Desert and The Hours (Lenten Season 2009)

I caught a glimpse of yesterdays’ Academy Awards, though shamefully I must admit, have only watched one of the nominated (the exquisite and riveting film called Doubt). It brought me back to a year wherein one of the nominated films was a depressing flick called “The Hours” and the trendsetting ugli-fication of celluloid beauties such as Nicole Kidman (she supposedly won her Oscar by a nose).

In the lovely tragic film that explores the circumstances of suicidal writer Virginia Woolf and two other women from different time periods: a 60’s Julianne Moore and a pre-“Miranda Priestly” Meryll Streep. The lives of the three women woven within the tragic narrative where love, death and acceptance play strange bedfellows.

One of the more poignant episodes is the time wherein Virginia Woolf converses with her husband Leonard in an empty railway station uttering: “…You cannot find peace while avoiding life…”

I believe that the Lent is that time would always try and ask the more difficult questions and that I believe might be one as such.

Ironically, some Lenten practices center around avoidances of pork, chocolates, sodas, texting and perhaps, wildly to say, facebook?

But I do believe that there is something truly connected between Lent season and the words of our tragic yet creative heroine.

In the movie, before Virginia Woolf takes her own life… her reflections spoke out as she took to the waters:

… To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is…

Many moons ago, a man began to look life in the face, despite isolation and sadness, fatigue, loneliness & fear. The man saw beyond the illusion of hunger, anguish and the easy-way out and saw life for what it is:which he could have avoided and lived a quiet existence making tables and chairs never entering the desert much less a city that would turn on him completely.

That man never avoided life, despite numerous limitations, obstacles and eventually climaxing into the horrendous, the painful death: to look life in the face and to know it for what it is… to love it for what it is and not how we wish it were or how we demand it would be. That man looked life in the face and saw much more, beyond the illusion of the finitude and loves for what it is.

Such a man, dares to enter into our own brokeness and pain and assures us with peace.

As we go through our own deserts this lenten season, lets us look to the one who never avoided life, not because we constantly need a quick fix for our brokeness, our neediness and pains, but to move on a journey of acceptance and true peace.

In order for us to embrace our own lives: to look life in the face and to know it

for what it is…to love it for what it is.

Have a meaningful lenten season