Am I a fool -- or what?

I looked rather strange with ashes on my forehead several Wednesdays ago.

Yet that's how many people look each year at the outset of the 40-day Christian season called Lent We look quite foolish with a black, ashen cross on our faces reminding us of our mortality. To most post-moderns that probably seems utter folly to underscore our death, our ultimate return to dust. After all, we live in an exercise-until-you-drop skinny-glorifying-Western-culture and -- strangely enough --concurrently with an eat-all-you-want-because-you-can Mickey D way of life -- both seeming to exist as two different approaches to "death denying and death defying" feats.

So here I am on this Friday before Holy Week, the final stretch in this Lenten journey of reflection, self-exam and repentance. It lasts from Ash Wednesday to the Saturday before Easter Day-- a significant period to take a long look at who I am, why I am, and where my life is going.

Among other Lenten reflective disciplines, we are encourage to do some spiritual reading. I chose to read two books, one by Thomas Merton and one by Kenneth Leech -- "We Preach Christ Crucified" (Cowley Publications, 1994) -- a re-read for me of a personally very helpful book. (I read it 12 years ago during a hinge-period in my faith-journey and while serving as a chaplain on a six-month deployment aboard a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean and Agean Seas.)

Leech has served for many years as an Anglican priest at St. Botolph's, a church located on the edge of a tough, inner-city London neighborhood. His little 101-page book deals with, among other things, the contradictory folly of looking to the crushed and broken, ancient Jesus for our hope "in a world that continues to crush and break the children of God" (p. 6). All this seems like an utter inconsistent folly -- that God would use such a life-story, yes, such a non-power-hungry person, to show us how human life can and should be lived if it is to have real meaning.

From a worldly value system it is sheer idiocy to focus one's energies with a Leader-Lord who identifies with outcasts, makes extreme demands on his followers, and clearly makes a "polemic against the rich and the devout, all culminating in his death as a rebel and criminal" (Leech, p. 8).

So in Lent we are invited to head straight toward Easter -- and beyond --with this Christ who is a "fool", a symbol of contradiction, yes, a "mirror" of the seemingly strange, contradictory foolishness of God. And those who follow his way are called to an ongoing conversion to become shareholders in the folly.

At the end of the day, we are invited to become, in the words of Paul, "fools for Christ sake" (1 Corinthians 4:10). Yet strangely enough the result of becoming that kind of fool is a deep, abiding Easter-life that has been the fountainhead of joy discovered by many persons (diverse saints) down through the ages.

Lord, I want to re-discover that "folly", that deep joy. Count me in!