No longer I

Paul's most startling sentence, and the clearest description in the New Testament of what these forty days are for. Not a metaphor; a report. The small self is crucified, fallen into the ground like the grain of wheat, and what lives now is something larger, looking out through the same eyes. You will not feel this every morning. But on a fasting day, thirty-eight days in, sitting in the dark, you may catch the edge of it: the sense that the one sitting is not quite the one who began, and that whoever it is, they are not alone.