It's Lent -- The Monster Locked in the Bedroom

My favorite "Lent" joke was one I first heard when I was around nineteen. It goes like this (from before the era of women priests):

A priest's wife wanted to get it on with her husband. She put on her most sexy nighty and went to him one evening to make her desires known. He looked at her aghast and said, "But honey -- it's Lent." Shocked, outraged, and indignant she replied, "to whom and for how long?!"

The hidden truth of this joke, and why it has stuck with me all these years, points beautifully to a wrong way of engaging in a spiritual discipline. Refraining from something -- denying one's self something -- is often sort of like lending it out. It comes back with interest at the end of the term. Whether it's the decision not to eat chocolate or the resolve not to engage in angry confrontations, giving something up without some deep soul-searching merely insures that it will come tearing out even stronger than it was before, once one lifts the ban. And if there is to be no lifting of the ban, it comes back anyway, ripping through all one's resolve in a blizzard of denial and double-talk.

We generally give up things that we've deemed unhealthy, or things that alarm us a little in their hold over us. It is a good thing to ask, when we give these things up, who are we giving them to -- and for how long.

A Sufi teaching story puts it this way. A man found an ugly ogre rampaging through his house. The clever fellow waited until the monster went into a small bedroom, then slammed the door. He leaned against it, exultant that he had solved the problem. There was just one difficulty -- he had forgotten to bring a key for the door's lock. He had to keep leaning against the door if he wanted the monster to remain inside.

He figured that if he just leaned against that door for long enough, the ogre would fall asleep or grow weak, and he'd be able to run and get the key. Instead the monster seemed to be growing stronger. The man, unable to leave his post for food or water, began to grow weaker. The longer the ogre was confined, the more angry he became. It was soon a matter of life and death. The man believed he would never be able to leave his post without being killed by the trapped monster.

The interesting thing is that the ogre was a prince who had magically been changed into a monster. He had been looking for the way back into his true form when the man had trapped him. Inside the little room he lost all sense of his humanity. He called out to the man in the enraged voice of a monster and the man responded in terror. If the man had confronted him face to face instead of locking him up, they could have talked together and together sought the solution to the ogre's problem.

Giving our addictions, our shameful behaviors, our overarching desires, to the little ego who wants to stuff them in a room somewhere usually winds up in disaster. Generally there is a bewitched prince -- something beautiful, honorable, protective of the Psyche -- hidden within them.

So, how does one talk to monsters in order to draw out the inner prince? Learning the answer to that question would be the right sort of spiritual discipline.