He wasn't far off the mark about heaven. He understood that his life had become cluttered with all manner of facile cleverness and self interest. His thoughts, concepts, habits and desires had staled like yesterday's bread because they were directed to himself rather than to Jesus who makes all things new. At that point in his career Ritchie wasn't sick of his thoughts but sick of himself.

I think we all feel the same way from time to time as the demands of work and family press in on us and our spiritual lives get crowded out. Of course, the path to heaven is not purging our minds of thought, desire and habit (other religions have tried those routes without much success). Our path is upwards to Jesus by allowing our minds to be elevated by the Word and by healthy habits which enable the Spirit to root deeply in us.

All this requires deliberation and discipline. Lent is the season of the Christian year when we seek to address our spiritual clutter and to replace bad habits with good ones. We need to be discerning as we do so. The self-help industry has adopted the language of spirituality in recent years, and it is easy to find oneself engaged in rarefied forms of narcissism posing as spiritual renewal. No matter how psychologically and religiously cultivated we become, if we are no more than a holy ego, a sacro egoismo, we will still have not opened ourselves to the Holy Spirit. Holiness is not, in the end, the same thing as becoming a balanced and self-affirming personality (if it were, what hope for St. Paul or many of the prophets?) The attitude for true discipleship is this: "He must increase and I must decrease."

We are called to be witnesses of the love of God and all he has done to make us his own. "He indeed died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised." What of our stale thoughts, concepts, habits, desires, fancies? "I consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord," wrote St. Paul. "For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ . . . to know him and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead."

Let sight, will, thought desire, habit assume one essential attitude: "Be it unto me according to thy word." If they do, we will be able to say at the end of Lent that it is not I who live but Christ who lives in me, and we shall be renewed indeed.

Anthony Burton
Bishop of Saskatchewan