Lent 1

The season of Lent, for Christians, is a time that invites us to look at what we might otherwise not choose to see:

What we are living for, and why.

Death, even our own, and the small deaths we must die each day.

These questions of Lent, which find me here, in the accountant’s office. Asking hard questions.  Willing escape.

Lent I

“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness”
(Mark 1:12)

It begins here
as it always does,
in this temptation,
the enticement to escape
by will or wit
the inevitable decline
the insatiable need.

Which leads me here
to her small corner office
where she leans across the long
dark oval table,
tells me, indeed,
there is no escape,
this matter of money.
this calculation of assets
and wind-fall projections.

No escape,
that is,
as long as you are alive.

No escape,
from the insistent questions she asks
of dreams and goals,
the estimation of how long
we shall live,
the risks and necessity
of long-range planning.

But never enough, though,
never,
to save us from this
present uncertainty,
and certain decline,
the quick slip, and fall,
the pit, the grave.

Makes me
long to turn, like Judas,
seize my bag of gold,
and run,
find my faith
in more certain things.

Lent,
which finds me here,
as the young accountant
bounces away
with more papers to sign
and I awake,
early morning,
sweaty in dread.

Peter Ilgenfritz
February 26, 2015