The Purpose of Lent

Lent began this week as we celebrated Ash Wednesday. In the Christian liturgical calendar, Lent is time of preparation for Easter. Many Christians observe Lent by giving up something as a way of honoring the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. In Unity, Lent is not about self-denial or self-sacrifice. It is not a time to deny our human experience, but to grow in understanding of our spiritual nature so we might live more fully in conscious connection with it.

Charles Fillmore, the co-founder of Unity, in Keep a True Lent, says, “Lent is a season of spiritual growth, a time for progressive unfoldment.” It is a time for removing our focus from the things of world, and instead placing our attention on the things of Spirit. Lent is a time to “Let Go, and Let God.” 

It is a time for letting go of our attachment to our limited thoughts and beliefs about who we are which constitute our “ego structure,” and fully embracing ourselves as the embodiment of the Christ, our true nature. Setting ourselves free from the bonds of the ego structure is in essence the purpose of Lent.

Many, if not most of us, live within this ego structure without being conscious of it. It becomes our comfort zone. We derive a sense of safety and security from these familiar mental constructs. We operate under the false belief that, within this structure of clearly defined meanings, we have some control. However, these structures can become prisons of our own making. We are often imprisoned by them until we begin to become conscious of them and question them. We have the power, no – we are the power to set ourselves free.

It is not that the ego must die as some spiritual teachings suggest, but that our identification with it, as it, must cease. Also, contrary to some spiritual tradition, we must not try to dismantle the ego structure by attacking it.

Our attempts to dismantle the ego structure by trying to eliminate it or by dissecting and analyzing it are futile. In fact, that only serves to fortify it. The only way to free ourselves from the ego structure is to strengthen our conscious awareness of the True Self, the Christ within, and allow its Light and Love to dissolve the imprisoning walls of the ego structure.

We need not struggle and strain with letting go. We only need invite the awareness of our Christ nature to awaken in our hearts and minds through the practice of prayer, meditation and contemplation. We need only, as the master teacher Jesus instructed, “Seek first the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33), and to know that the “Kingdom of God is within” (Luke 17:21).

As Mr. Fillmore also stated, “When we can blend and merge our mind with God-Mind, the way is open for the Lord [the Spiritual activity of the I Am, the Christ] to glorify us and to lift us into a higher, purer, more spiritual state.”

We then attract into our life all that reflects and supports our expanded awareness. All that is not in harmony with our “higher, purer, more spiritual state” will fall away because we will no longer be attracting it to us. We do not need to know what we must release. It will be revealed to us as we are ready to know it. Further, letting go will only be painful if we attempt to hold on to that which is no longer in resonance with us.

In Unity, we teach that Jesus was not here to “save” us through his sacrifice on the cross. Instead Jesus was here to show us how to “save” ourselves. In other words, he taught us how to free ourselves from imprisonment within the ego structure. We can only do this by strengthening our conscious awareness of the Christ within and allowing the ego structure to fall away or be transformed.

Jesus knew that in order for us to experience resurrection, which Father Richard Rohr in his book Immortal Diamond equates to the “revelation of the True Self,” that we must also experience death. The death that we must experience is a transformation of the ego structures that we have allowed to define and confine us.

I encourage us to commit time daily to the practice of going within to make conscious connection with the Christ of our being, to sit in the heart space of love with it, to see ourselves and the world through the eyes of the Christ, thus to free ourselves to live as the Christ in the world. Freed from the ego structure, the True Self enjoys the space to express in the freedom that it is. This is the purpose of Lent. This is the potential of Easter. This is the promise of the resurrection.