“Es irrt der Mensch, so lang ‘er strebt”
“Man must err, as long as he strives.”

 

When I told Father Gregory that I was reading Frankenstein he scolded me and said, “NOT during Lent.”  I reassured him that Frankenstein is the stuff Lent is made of…that it is a profound critique of one of man’s supreme passions…the pursuit of knowledge.

I finished Frankenstein and proceeded with Goethe’s Faust…another dark tale of intellectual and spiritual greed.

Faust- Man’s greatest attempts at playing God makes him no more than a sorcerer.

Frankenstein- And what he conjures is monstrous.

What does all this have to do with Lent, and the struggle?

Lent is rest…it is a noetic oasis…it is the time when man strips his intellect of grandeur and becomes as the dust…it is a way out of the madness we have created,  to undo 0ur conjuring.

Lent is the struggle to cease the struggle…a paradox that weakens us as it gives strength.