Most of the time the world rotates around me.  I eat when I want to and what I want to.  I take two
showers a day.  I get my feet massaged with lotion while reclining on my leather couch, flipping through the
channels.  I call out, "Hey, could you bring my coffee in here?  A little sugar and cream would be nice."

And then comes Lent, the six weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  The Lenten season, historically a time of
soul-searching and repentance in the Church, looks me directly in the eyes and says: "Listen, buddy.  Yes, you with
the potato chips in both hands.  The world does not rotate around you.  Change your ways.  For once in your life
think beyond your own tiny world."

This morning as I pondered today's Lenten reading the words of St. Paul dropped right on my pathway:  "I do not
understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I do not do it.  Instead, I do the very thing I hate.
…  I know that I am rotten through and through so far as my old sinful nature is concerned.  No matter which way I
turn, I can't make myself do right.  I want to, but I can't."  (Romans 7:15, 18-19).

Almost every day of Lent I have thought about my great temptation.  The seductive serpent in the book of Genesis
delineates it with beautiful simplicity: "You will become just like God, knowing everything, both good and evil."
(Genesis 3:5)  In short, the temptation is let the world rotate around me.

I want a safe, predictable God, not one who says, "Come, take up your cross and follow me."  So I carefully
orchestrate everything to ensure the world rotates just at my pace.  In her book, "Too Deep for Words," spiritual
director Thelma Hall says, "This illusion of a relative omnipotence, even when not a conscious individual choice,
finds us alienated -- from God, from one another, from our own inner selves -- and even from creation, as
evidenced in the growing devastation of our environment, violated in so many ways by the effects of that same
assumed omnipotence."

Hall says people spend their lives justifying a myriad of acceptable and "sane" ways of indulging their illusory claim
to divine power.

Some try and hold onto power by being proud and domineering parents.  Others are sadistic and overbearing
bosses.  There are nagging perfectionists.  Some are clowns while others are daredevils or free thinkers.  A person
can be rigidly conventional, or blatantly unconventional.    There are hermits and there are demagogues.  Some
satisfy their desire for divinity by knowing everybody else's business.  Some constantly judge their neighbor.  Others
tell everyone what to do.

Hall says some can even, alas, seek sanctity and religious perfection "as an unconscious satisfaction of this deep,
and hidden impurity of soul which is man's pride."

In his 1956 classic called "The Silent Life," monk and poet Thomas Merton wrote:  "… Although God our Father
made us free, he did not make us omnipotent. … This claim to omnipotence, our deepest secret and our inmost
shame, is in fact the source of all our sorrow, all our unhappiness, all our dissatisfactions, all our mistakes and
deceptions."

During Lent the Church implores us to forsake our claim to complete autonomy and instead to completely surrender
ourselves to the ways of Jesus.

This is the season to reflect, to take stock, to listen -- especially to the words of Jesus: "If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.  For those who want to save their
life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.  What does it profit them if they gain the whole
world, but lose themselves?" (Luke 9:23-25)

Merton poignantly personalizes Jesus' words:  "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought
I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die."

Be careful about making friends with the Holy Spirit, Merton says, "because he's going to ask you to die!"

Jesus himself put it this way:  "The truth is, a kernel of wheat must be planted in the soil.  Unless it does it will be
alone -- a single seed.  But its death will produce many new kernels -- a plentiful harvest of new lives."

 Don Follis is an Urbana minister.  Reprinted with permission from the
Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, copyright 2002.