The Post-Lenten Resurrection Rag

Lent this year was less than satisfying, although as Fr Jeff stated, we have a propensity for embracing the concept of hair shirts and ashes and eschew the joys of salvation - maybe he didn't state it just that way, but point being - it's easier for us to suffer than rejoice and when we (I) don't suffer enough, Lent has not been successful. At any rate, toward the end of the meditative mea culpas and half-hearted deprivations, I had a really bad cold while reading As I Lay Dying and maybe made up for my lackluster Lent. Maybe. And I thought about to what extent we participate in our own deaths - we do, of course, but how consciously? And maybe Voltaire was correct in his perception of Christ's sacrifice as a form of suicide - condoned by The Big Guy, but nonetheless. When we buy into fate, into our destiny, into doing what's expected that sort of self-abnegation is a little death. A small death, and maybe not so important, but certainly more in the realm of suffering than rejoicing, no? And when, really, did Jesus decide Daddy wasn't coming to save him and game was on with the Roman soldiers? Was he hoping right up until the end that he wasn't going to have to die up there, or at the very least, not an ignominious death - maybe something really spectacular and immediate - more compelling than darkening sky and rending curtains in the tabernacle? Like The Mother Ship. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/11/AR2010041103996.html?hpid=artslot