For much of my life, Lent has found me
feeling rebellious. The fruit trees are in bloom, the forsythia glows golden,
the Japanese quinces are patches of Oriental red, you wake to a dawn chorus of
newly-joyful birds. You feel like Swinburne’s chorus:
For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember'd is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
And then you are put to school to grief and
repentance, you are told to remember what a general misery you are and to
acknowledge and bewail your manifold sins and wickedness, in flagrant contradiction
of the season. So you half-heartedly try to give up chocolate, occasionally
feel, and fight, a twinge of guilt, and roll on Easter.
It
is only since, at 70, I decided that it was time for a new adventure and that
the one befitting my age was faith, that I have begun (and only begun) to
understand the meaning, and the richness of Lent. As a French clergyman put it
recently, one might look at it as an athlete’s training period. Or, to quote an
American Benedictine, see it as an annual opportunity to concentrate on what
needs doing to become a better recipient of all the grace that stands ready to
be poured into one.
Does
anyone still do spring cleaning? I remember it from my youth. The house gets
turned upside down, one room at a time, and cleaned to within an inch of its
life. (And no one thought that
contradicted the season.)
You
are not meant to go around feeling guilt and gloom. But on the other hand, you are encouraged to face up to yourself.
Like alcoholics in AA, you are meant to take this opportunity of looking your
whole self in the face, including those things that weigh upon you in the night
time, those things you wish you had or hadn’t done or said or even thought,
those things you’d much rather ignore but which, as any psychologist will tell
you, come back through the kitchen door after being chased out the front.
Faith
isn’t psychology, and – again as in AA – you are not expected to deal with all
this by yourself. The house to be cleaned is yours, but not only yours; and the
Master of the house is ready to lend a hand. So where to begin?
Like
many good things, I learned, Lent is divided into three parts: prayer, fasting,
and giving. The big difference with the old days of giving up chocolate is
prayer. It’s the joyful basis of the whole thing. Because in conversation with
a loving Father, you can look at yourself with complete honesty and see what
needs changing and what needs forgiving.
Fasting
I am terrible at, perhaps because we went through a period of famine near the
end of WW II when I was 3. Explanation, not excuse. But perhaps there are ways,
even for a 21st-century far-from-monk, to learn. In the first place,
it helps to know what it’s for. I
only learnt how to give up smoking when there was something I wanted more –
rock-climbing – that was incompatible with 16 cigarettes a day. Fasting, or in
any case selective abstinence, helps to remind you on a daily basis of the
spring cleaning that is going on. As when cleaning house, you are reminded of
all the stuff you don’t really need. And it also shows you how much you still
have to learn. Christian fasting isn’t Ramadan; but when I see Muslims keeping
Ramadan faithfully even in the scorching days of summer, I feel a kind of
rueful respect for them, and I’m not proud of myself or most of my supposed
co-religionists.
So
to learn fasting, you turn to prayer, again. Prayer is the basis of Lent, I’m
finding. Prayer, and reading. This Lent, I’m reading the Psalms in Coverdale’s
Prayer Book version (often inaccurate, but delightful: ‘Why hop ye so, ye high
hills?”) as the BCP prescribes, morning and evening daily. Also the brief daily
readings in a little French Lent booklet; and occasional forays into some
Benedictine and Carthusian texts. For one usually more given to James Lee Burke,
Robert Harris or Reginald Hill, this is refreshing, and provides far more
profound insights into this Lenten business than one would normally have.
The
third pillar of Lent is almsgiving. The etymology of “alms” is from Greek eleos, meaning mercy or compassion. Alms are the material aspect of mercy and
compassion, of a fellow-feeling with those who lack. Apart from the fact that
it is always good to show solidarity with the needy, you can see how this fits
into the Lenten process of spring cleaning. Prayer and reading connect us to
God, thus helping us fulfil the First Commandment; almsgiving connects us to
our neighbour, thus helping us with the Second.
And both remind us that Lent is not just about Me, about Becoming a
Better Person, like New Year’s resolutions: it is about something far deeper. A
Carthusian letter about God’s nature as Love puts the whole thing in a
vertiginous perspective: God is Love, and thus has only one desire: to give. To
give Himself completely, to us. Too often he finds our houses closed: doors
shut, shutters tight. So he knocks. Do we hear? Only if we have taken off our
skull candy headphones. Only if we aren’t texting. Only if we are in a
condition to hear, and to open ourselves. That’s
what Lent is about: getting into condition to be helpless, humble, receptive,
and open. So that we can receive the huge joy He can’t wait to give.
