Towards Easter! Let yourself be transformed, let us transform!
Reflections by Paolo Spina*
Let yourself be transformed, let us transform! With the Ash Wednesday, Lent begins: 40 days towards Easter, which arrives every year and yet it marks a new and always different stop on the journey discussing with Jesus. Once it was called "Strong Time"; Today we could also say "Time Queer":
- It is a period of transformation, once "out of the norm", where to get out of the torpor of the habit to experience a different way of being in the world, as the sprout is reworked and begins to blossom, challenging the rigidity of the dry branch that for the entire winter had been its life norm
- It is a time of margin and possibilities, suspended between today and Easter, between the exodus in the desert and the promised land, between the slavery of the idols and the freedom wide open by life that in God, lover and vital, always rises: a transition time
- It is a path of transformation: "Let yourself be transformed, renewing your way of thinking", as Paul recalls in his letter to the Romans, recalling half, that is, that conversion that allows us to know ourselves in a new way, to re-fulfill us, in a coming out that at the same time reconfigures our image and brings us back to the whole truth about us
- It is once to return to the concreteness of our body, of the desires that inhabit it and what it is felt when it is without it: this is the authentic sense of a fast that returns to the essentials, of a spirituality that unifies life, of a solidarity that opens to the other and the other
- It is the path traced by Jesus who, preaching his message of love without conditions and towards all and all, challenges the social and religious rules of his time, accepting to live on the margins of the society to propose with radical need a model of life that exceeds the categories imposed by a system enemy of the human being and, therefore, unfaithful to God
Reflection, change, new possibilities: this is the light that we ask God at the beginning of this Lent, so that it is a path of spiritual and above all human growth.
* Paolo Spina is a doctor, passionate about sacred writing and feminist theology and queer, who collaborates with the LGBT Christian Project+ and with The Gionat tentTo write on topical issues and Christianity.
