Renounce Baloney and Subvert the Dystopia

Charlotte Cowles writes about personal finance for prestigious publications like the New York Times. She writes about how to save money, plan for retirement, or create a budget; things like that. She’s one of the experts with advice for the rest of us.
 
That’s why it made the news this week when she admitted being victim to an internet scam. It started with a phone call from somebody posing as a customer service agent, tricking her into believing that there’d been some fraudulent activity in her accounts. One thing led to another – you can read the details online - and she ended up defrauded of $50,000.
 
Many people reacted: “wow, if a sophisticated journalist can get scammed, the rest of us had better watch out.” We all live in a “high information” society, with lots of our personal information out there on the internet. But it’s a “low trust” society because, among other reasons, so much of our life is mediated by strangers on the other end of 800 numbers and corporate websites.
 
Here’s another story to show what I mean. Also this week, my wife was on the phone for hours organizing health insurance for one of our daughters. One morning, a Blue Cross agent told her that this particular doctor was covered, in network, no problem. The next day, another agent told us exactly the opposite. Hours and hours on the phone, and you still can’t get a straight answer about significant medical expenses.
 
Final story: on Thursday, I was in a meeting with a university administrator, as a character witness, trying to help a student. The administrator had an incomprehensible job title, something like “assistant associate dean to the deputy vice-president for management.” As the meeting began, I struggled to understand what she was saying. It was all bureaucratic jargon, something like “we have to adjudicate the process of the protocol for the procedures.” Only when the student finally got her turn in the conversation, with a wonderful naïve teenage manner, and on the edge of tears, did the conversation become human and comprehensible.
 
The point of these stories is to say that a lot of us live with constant low-grade anxieties created by the scale and pace – the bureaucracies and technologies - of modern life. To live on a human scale at a humane pace is countercultural. Throw in the pandemic, the election, or the media, and it creates a context that is spiritually relevant. Many people are living in a state of high tension, alienated, quick to get defensive, quick to be suspicious.
 
And yet, we’re Christians. We’re people who confess that God is alive, that he is at work. Where can we find him? How should we seek him?
 
In today’s readings, Noah’s ark comes up a lot. I confess I’m sympathetic with the flood. There are times when I’m like: Lord, the system is too broken. Please come quickly, wash it all away, let’s start over.
 
But the Lord already did that once. The world was so wicked in Noah’s time that God sent the flood to wipe out everything except the eight righteous members of Noah’s family and the animals in the ark. The Lord understands our frustration and impatience; he sees all, and justice is coming.

But in the new covenant, God put a rainbow in the sky, as a sign that he’s not going to do that again. The new covenant, it says in our second reading, is baptism. We’re going to be plunged into waters again, but this time, not to wipe out the world, but to start a new way of living in the world.

This time, even if some days it feels like a dystopia, we're in a new covenant with God and each other. This covenant is the most solid thing in the world. As baptized Christians, we are commissioned secret agents behind enemy lines, in the world but not of it. Every time we stand up for what is human and holy, we throw a little monkey wrench into the dystopia.
 
These are the scriptures that the Church offers us on the first Sunday of Lent. The Church’s invitation in Lent is to withdraw for 40 days, like Noah riding out the storm in his ark, or Jesus retreating into the desert. 40 days of prayer and reflection, 40 days to refocus on the truth about our situation, 40 days to re-center on our identity as baptized into a covenant with God.
 
When Jesus took his 40-day retreat, it says in today’s Gospel that Satan tempted him, and that the angels ministered to him. Both angels and demons were in the desert with Jesus, just like they are both here now, in our own lives.
 
There are demons who are delighted that we’re stuck in bad habits and anxieties. There are demons who are delighted when we’re cool and indifferent to one another. There are demons who are delighted when we are too busy to pray, too angry or anxious to listen for the quiet voice of God.
 
But there are angels ready to help us. Maybe there’s a little spot in our heart that is ready to be kind to someone who is lonely. Maybe there’s a little spot in our heart that is ready for quiet, ready to sit still for a few minutes and seek the balm of deep prayer. Maybe there’s a restlessness, a longing for something better, something more honest, more beautiful, more human. These movements in our hearts might just be the angels nudging us, inviting us to new life.
 
Lent is a 40 day campaign to banish Satan and create space for the angels. Lent is 40 days to embrace habits and disciplines that cultivate interior peace, 40 days to rebel against everything that leads us away from being human. Lent is 40 days for disciplines that embed us into the covenant, that recollect how we are created in the image of God, that creation is good, that God loves us - his children - and that there is hope.
 
Satan never gives up without a fight. He came at Jesus in the desert three times. Changing our lives, protecting what is humane, rooting ourselves spiritually, living counter-culturally, subverting the dystopia, remembering that we are beloved – it all requires some discipline. That’s why we’ve got to be intentional about it, and have a plan.
 
The good news is that Easter is coming. 40 days from now, if we have a Lent seeking new life, a Lent of renouncing all the baloney, we’ll be ready for Easter. On Easter, when Jesus rises, we will be ready to rise too, clean and refreshed for the future – like Noah after the flood, or like today’s Epistle, describing the clean conscience of having just been baptized. New life, new beginnings, are always possible with God.
 
But first we’ve got the gift of time, the gift of 40 days. It’s not Easter yet. The first step can be right now in this Eucharist, returning to the Lord all over again. And then after this Mass, more or less 40 more days to step back from the anxiety, 40 days to remember who we really are.