First Sunday of Lent Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10 | Romans 10:8-13 | Luke 4:1-13

We do not understand the incredibly radical nature of the cross. Lent is about the cross. It is about living the cross, for it is the only major spiritual discipline of the Christian. But what does the cross mean? We have trivialized it by turning the cross into piles of cheap keepsakes and jewelry. We tend to use the cross more as a marker of identity than as a way of holiness and transformation.

Additionally, there is something quite revealing about the devil in the Gospel reading. The devil comes to us when we feel our inordinate needs for security, control, or affection, which are symbolized by the three temptations. Centrally, these temptations hinge on the conditional phrase “If you are the Son of God.” The devil wants Jesus, and us, to doubt our oneness with God, our divine identity. When we start to doubt this, we fall under the great illusion of separation, i.e., that we are separate from God.

Now, if we fall under the spell of believing we are separate from God, we dwell in the shadows of the ego and its complete identification with the contents of the mind. Thought and emotion dominate our spirits, congealing into desire or erupting as the mind’s complaints. Commentary, impulse, and fear arise from the ego.

But enlightenment is now. You and I are already one with God. Like Jesus, we are, here and now, the daughters and sons of God. This is not a future reality. It is true here and now. Simply put, we do not know this, enjoy it, live it, or realize it. And it is the great good news Jesus wants to give us. How do we realize we are one with God?

These issues come together in a startling term from Christian mysticism: self-annihilation. The soul realizes the radical nature of the cross, can change the world, and can enjoy oneness with God through self-annihilation, and, specifically, the self-annihilation Jesus suffers on the cross. An ancient hermit named Stephen of Muret puts it well: “If it is the Son of God you wish to imitate – he who emptied himself – you will have to reduce yourself to nothing.”

Now, mystical self-annihilation does not mean literal suicide. Rather, it is an inner reduction to nothing or an emptying of the mind. And it is not new or a quirky teaching from a singularly obscure hermit! For instance, the great medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhart, teaches us: “The single act of the spiritual life is to reduce self to nothingness.” He advises us to reduce the self to nothing to discover the nothingness of God.

How does one reduce self to nothing? How do we annihilate the self? Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, interprets this “reduction to nothing”: “Silence is to become nothing, to enter the void…This is to pray to the Father and to relate to the secrecy of the Ultimate Mystery.” Self-annihilation, primarily, is a state of prayer that we apply to the different aspects of our lives. Self-annihilation happens in prayer and daily life as we abide in contemplative silence.

To annihilate the self is an inner discipline. It is to let go of thinking and emotion to abide in a state of inner silence. In this state, the ego, the very idea of self, disappears. This happens as we return, continually, to the silence. Attention is negation. When we direct attention to God in silence, we negate everything else but most of all treating the ego as the center of attention. To center on nothing but God and pay attention to God does not mean thinking about God but resting in nothingness because God is not a thing.

Here is the practice we all need for Lent: abide in contemplative silence as much as we can. And this involves the release of all mental content and processes to simply rest in God’s mystery. We do this through a practice of prayer, or, as we call it today, meditation. Indeed, this is the central penitential practice that Jesus recommends. Fasting and almsgiving only make sense, from a spiritual point of view, if they are done in a spirit of prayer. And this means practicing while abiding in contemplative (non-thinking) silence.

We discover our unity with God through self-annihilation. To be one with Jesus, the Son of God, we must do what he did. We must annihilate the self. Jesus is clear about this when he tells us to deny ourselves and lose our lives (see Mark 8:34-35). This is our Lenten theme for The Mystical Word. We will reflect on several mystics who teach self-annihilation: John Chapman, Francois Fenelon, St. Paul of the Cross, and St. John of the Cross. I hope that we can live self-annihilation, that is, the cross, and then experience a spiritual transformation. For, this Lent we can start a truly effective revolution that can radiate to everyone: let go of the self to enjoy God. Love and peace are then set loose in the world.