love and right and wrong

“The trouble with you is that it’s never your fault.” The words hit her like a slap across her face. “Well, it rarely is.” She spat back.

Carol is a pretty mixed up sort of person. As a child she had been abused in multiple ways. She had received mixed signals about things like love and right and wrong. This influenced the way she behaved. Some might have put it that she was more prone to sinning. She was chronically depressed and her marriage wasn’t happy. There were emotional, social and financial pressures. She blamed her inability to cope with all this on her parents. They had made her who she was. It was the influences of her childhood which led to her adult choices. 

If we look at the situation Jesus was in and at the behaviour he modelled when he was being tested, we see ways which may help us. Self -awareness is one key to resisting temptation. At weight loss groups, they advise you to not go food shopping n an empty stomach. You are more vulnerable to temptation when you are hungry. This requires being aware of your hunger. We don’t only hunger for food. We hunger for attention, love, acceptance, status, and material goods.  We will be more able to see temptation for what it is we hunger for when we are more self- aware.

Each of the temptations which Jesus faced were about things any of us could hunger for. The first was for food, the second for loving care and attention, especially from our parents and the third for possessions and power. When we look at the advertising that surrounds us, we might even say, envelopes us continually, we can see it falls into these same three categories.  Fast food advertisements may not be about the food as much as the caring, promoting so called ‘family meals’, or the comfort and fun chocolate can give. Car and house ads are about prestige and the power associated with them.

the powers of this world

In the Gospel story of the temptations, Jesus is engaging the powers of this world--the underbelly of human existence, that is embodied for the purpose of telling the story in the figure of the devil. The powers of this world are the great resistant forces, largely uncontrollable, that hold people hostage, captive to the institutions and systems that carry us along, the forces that drive the spirit of the age promising life but leading to death. The powers of this world seek to render us powerless, before the immensity of the world's problems.

• These are the powers that say, "No one really wants war, but the bodies keep piling up."
• That say, "No one really wants homelessness, but we can't seem to do anything about it."
• That say, "No child needs to die of hunger anywhere, but especially in the wealthiest nation on earth, and yet they do."
• These are the powers that say, "I am not really living, but simply being driven along by forces beyond my control."

http://day1.org/2694-choose_life

if you go to the desert

If you therefore go to the desert to be rid of all the dreadful people and all the awful problems in your life, you will be wasting your time. You should go to the desert for a total confrontation with yourself. For one goes to the desert to see more and to see better. One goes to the desert especially to take a closer look at the things and people one would rather not see, to face situations one would rather avoid, to answer questions one would rather forget.
-Alessandro Pronzato
Meditations on the Sand
http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/lent1a.html