As I began to reflect on an article for Lent, one of the early things to come to my mind was the question, "Why is the Lenten period so long?" It is in fact seven weeks, forty days not counting Sundays. But why so long? Is it that important? Charles Henderson remarks "Now you'll have to confess this season does not exactly electrify modern day Christians. In this fast moving world, we lack the patience for a holiday of such length We're more enamored by the one day extravaganza, like Christmas, Easter, or Superbowl Sunday." It has been a part of the Christian calendar for over 1700 years and since about 350 CE has had its present seven-week period. My reflections led me to the conviction that its length could only be explained by its marking a very important role in the Christian life. But what could it be? It is certainly not represented in the usual approach of giving up something for this period of time whether it be abstaining from eating meat, going to the movies, or smoking, or positively to be better persons. It is not a time when, like New Years, we make a list of good resolutions for our personal reformation and promise ourselves to keep them all, of course failing for the most part and then, if we were at all serious, feeling guilty. This moralistic approach simply cannot be the essence of Lent.
Henderson helped put me on the track of something more profound as he commented further "This is the season for exploring the mysteries. This is the time for looking beneath the surface, for looking within ourselves, examining our own motives and desires, asking ourselves where we are headed. What in the world makes us tick. Where does our real commitment lie?" The latter two questions reminded me of Tillich's splendid understanding of faith as ultimate concern. But all this, good as it was, did not explain why this should be the longest and thus, arguably the most important season in the Christian year.

At last some inspiration struck:

• What is it that is repeated and repeatedly necessary in the Christian life, something far more profound than simple repentance of past sins?
  
• What is the most fundamental process of the Christian life?

It seems that some church groups make this process (though misunderstood too often as a once-upon-a-time thing) a very important factor in their congregational life. I'm speaking of the "born-again" groups of course. But I think they do not grasp the true depth of what they are talking about. Getting born again presumes what? Why dying of course! Death has to precede rebirth. And so conversion and some powerful conversion experience have long occupied a prominent place for many Christian groups. Yet that still seems too minor a thing to occupy seven weeks' time every year. But how can you die more than once, or get born again more than once? Well one way is obviously to "fall off the wagon", but that is also pretty shallow to occupy a prominent place in the Christian year. As Henderson goes on to say, we need to reflect on the science of repentance.

Although the spiritual path may be marked by one or many episodes of satori, to use the Eastern term, it is more marked by what, in modern Western terms, is usually called stages. In the early process of human development, the stages of spirituality are essentially those that have been well documented by the developmental psychologists. However, these studies have stopped at the stage of development of mature rationality. The transpersonal psychologists have gone beyond the usual six stages to include two or three more stages of specifically spiritual development. It is beyond the scope of this brief paper to recap these stages, nor is the following discussion an attempt to introduce the correct technical language of transpersonal psychology. However, the stages have been briefly described in Ken Wilber's general introduction to his thinking titled "A Brief History of Everything", and a more specific application of those insights to the issues of spirituality in his "The Eye of Spirit". The fact I want to focus upon is this: the transition from one stage to the next always involves a death-rebirth experience. To move from one stage to the next requires a "letting go" which is truly a dying to the central personality of that previous stage. This letting go is the death experience and the entering of the new self-structure (personality) is the rebirth.

In Wilber's delineation there are some nine stages to the whole of spiritual (consciousness) development. Note, I am equating spiritual development with the development of consciousness. In one respect, these nine stages can be reduced to five:

• Matter
• Body
• Mind
• Soul
• Spirit

Thus each stage of spiritual development, the development of a next stage of consciousness, is marked by a particular process, which is, in fact, a death-rebirth process. If one refuses to die, then consciousness development, spiritual development, is frozen at that level. To reflect back to the question about the length and therefore the presumed importance of Lent: it marks this central and repeated process of spiritual development; a process through death to rebirth. Small wonder that it received so much consideration in the Christian year. Without death-rebirth there is no spiritual development. As the Apostle Paul put it, when he was a child, he thought as a child, but now in maturity he had put away childish things. His writings do not, of course, trace the stages of development.
A few steps mark the process of movement: First is restlessness with the stage in which one is. This restlessness may be more or less profound and accompanied by varying kind of questions. Here I am focusing not on early childhood, but on the steps of spiritual development beginning at steps five and six of the nine, for it is at step five and six that we find the average adult today. This is where, in the simplified version, one is moving from mind to soul and soul to spirit. The restlessness is the inner work of the spirit to move the person on toward the Divine. It may be experienced as a sense of futility as with the song made famous by Peggy Lee "Is This All There Is?". or by the question featured in the play and film "Alfie", "What's it all about Alfie?" Both questions are poignant and powerful!
In my own biography, this experience came, as it usually does, unexpectedly and out of the deep dark mystery of life. My brother-in-law, who was in many ways my mentor, 15 years older than I, a very successful executive with Montgomery Ward, at age 43, was felled by a ruptured aorta. Talk about a wake-up call! I was at that time on my own success trip, an airline captain, married and moving up in the world, gaining the appropriate accoutrements and signs of success in American society. But I was already experiencing the early stages of burnout. As the author of "The High and Mighty", and former American Airlines pilot, said, airline flying is endless hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. I was feeling both and when my brother-in-law died, I was driven to ask in the most existential way possible what I wanted to do with my life. "Is This all There Is? And "What's it all About?" He had been restless with his work for a number of years, but had found no way out. I was driven to find a way. After months of soul searching and with mixed motives and emotions, I resigned my captaincy and began to study for the ministry. I had taken the next step on the journey, which was to be a long one with more shocks and surprises.

The old identity has to be given up, let go, died to, but transcended and included, not repressed. The new identity may be slow to appear, or to be gained. But it certainly involves metanoia, a change of ultimate concern, a new center and goal for one's existence, a new worldview. In this developmental process there are some real dangers, pitfalls. One is that the old identify-structure is not merely transcended, but repressed and thus one becomes dissociated from it. Any, every, identify-structure, self-structure has good elements that cannot be left behind without creating scars in the new structure of consciousness. When the mind-identity emerges from the body-identity, it cannot, without grave danger, forget the body. One is now a mind, but also the mind grows out of the body and continues to depend upon it. The same is true for the soul. To become oriented to spirituality does not mean that one gives up the carefully built structure of rationality that has marked the Mind State. Setting one's heart on the Kingdom of God is not a thoughtless, mindless project. Love does not replace common sense, but transcends, incorporates and uses it.

Wilber argues that there are some explanatory principles that are most useful for us to understand this process of consciousness, spiritual development. He delineates a handful of them as follows in "The Eye of Spirit": First is to understand that each new stage brings with it not only new powers and possibilities, diffusing some earlier problems, but also brings with it new and unforeseen problems. Secondly, because development proceeds by differentiation and integration, it opens the door to dissociation. This latter means that one tries, instead of transcending and integrating, to omit the past self, leave out the good as well as the bad, or to repress the whole. Thirdly, there is a difference between natural hierarchy and pathological hierarchy. It is natural for the higher to transcend and integrate the lower, as the mind does the body. It is pathological when the higher not only transcends, but begins to repress the lower, to dominate and try to act as if the higher were the whole show. Fourthly, the higher with its higher power can not only dominate, but also destroy the lower. The human has risen above the non-human world, but in our arrogance, feeling virtually free of our dependence on the earth we are rapidly destroying the biosphere with no compassion. Auschwitz was not merely a product of the rational mind, but the rational mind hijacked by a lower development, tribalism (called Nazism), belonging to a lower stage of development.

Thus Lent-repentance means holy dying and holy living, a new ultimate concern, metanoia, a new; worldview. These transitions involve not only mental structures, but along with them shifts in our world of we-ness, and of cultural structure. Consider primary loyalties: for the child the shift in the pre-teen can be seen as moving from a family identity structure to a peer group structure. Later another shift will likely occur from a peer group, to a corporate group, but both within a national group. In each case appropriate cultural structures must be found or created, e.g., the move from tribal (gang) identity to larger group, to national identity. One needs also, if spiritual growth is to be sustained, to move from national to world identity and from merely including the human group to including the biosphere and then final unity with Spirit-God. It is important to realize that each of these shifts of transcendence opens the possibility of dissociation, repression and alienation. A number of studies have shown that only a very small percentage of the population reaches the level of transnational identity, still less to biosphere identity and a tiny number to God-Unity.

Some of these transitions can be negotiated without too much death-experience pain, but there is always some sense of loss and thus temptation to hold on the previous state. It requires, as the contemplative tradition seems to have known for centuries, a serious internal reflection, usually some contact with a community of those who have realized the higher stage, and often a personal guide. In the modern world, the field of psychotherapy has come be utilized for the transitions up to stage six, but seems to know little of anything beyond that into the purely spiritual realm. An experienced spiritual director/friend is able to assist one in these passages thus minimizing the time, pain and difficulty, but it is still one's own spiritual journey. This journey requires commitment and work, as well as prayer and devotion. It is always difficult and painful to let go of a previous identity and frightening to take up a new, previously untried one. Often one feels an acute loss of sense of worth and identity. Yet an equal danger is that of becoming inflated at the realization of the power and success represented in the new identity.