“Why is this Lent different from all other Lents?” Different indeed. Even before isolation, confinement, or incabination began, the pandemic was well and truly under way at the time of Ash Wednesday and, to boot, I was sick with sinusitis and a racking cough that made it impossible to go and receive the ashes. And since incabination? Some paradoxical developments.
First of all it should be said that I have been most unfairly fortunate in the conditions of my confinement. A comfortable old French farmhouse on the edge of a tiny village; being together as a couple; children in the other half of the house who will occasionally take turns at the shopping; a friendly atmosphere all round; around the house a couple of acres of field and garden; and on top of that a singularly beautiful spring; conditions could hardly have been better.
As Mardi Gras approached, I had had the idea of, for once, trying a Lent entirely without meat, something I’d never done before. (When I was a child we always ate frugally but there was no thought of fasting: that was for Catholics, and we were liberal Protestants.) Perhaps because at the age of 3 I had been, though protected as much as possible, through a real famine – the result of German reprisals following the failure of Operation Market Garden – I had never managed fasting of any kind. But as, since my 70th birthday, I had begun to take (my) religion more seriously, I found the current Catholic insistence on Lent as a tripedal experience of prayer, fasting, and giving attractive. More attractive than the old doctrine of repentance, repentance, and repentance. I liked the thought of Lent as a cheerful spring cleaning, the more since earlier I had always suffered from the imposed gloom at a time when Nature rejoices. Now, I was told, one can live Lent as a way to take all the parts of one’s faith more seriously: from “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness” to deepening prayer, sharing not only money but time and care with others, and – yes, well, fasting.
So I decided that “Carne, vale” would indeed be Goodbye to Meat, made a superb bœuf bourguignon for Mardi Gras, and have not touched meat or meat products since. Much to my own surprise, a combination of occasional fish and seafood (fishmongers are quite far away and rarely come to our market) with vegetarian dishes, often curries, worked very well indeed, and neither my wife (a natural almost-vegetarian) nor I missed meat.
As far as prayer was concerned, not only did I take to saying my morning prayers on my knees instead of in bed, but I decided to translate a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk into English – not at the computer but with a fountain pen in a notebook. This helped me not only to pray more consciously but to think about prayer for part of the day as well, and to learn: Carthusians are prayer’s ultimate professionals and although their experiences and thoughts are as far beyond me as a Himalayan North face is beyond a weekend climber, many precious crumbs fall from their table.
As for giving, on the one hand the Internet has multiplied both the opportunities and the ease of giving, and on the other hand the new Catholic teaching reminds us frequently of the degree to which giving is, and can and should be, about more than money. Which in turn makes one think about what to give to whom how and when; and makes one realise how many small opportunities there are in a day and a week for giving time, thought and care to others’ needs, needs of every kind. Not that one manages to seize them all: laziness, selfishness and care-less-ness don’t give up and go away, more’s the pity.
So here we are on Holy (or Maundy) Thursday. Commemorating has had good reason to become more inward. I saw a pleasant Palm Sunday Mass on television, but reading and, as they say, praying the Psalms on a daily basis and occasionally saying Morning or Evening Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer brings me, I honestly believe, closer to God. I have been rereading volume II (”Holy Week”) of Pope Benedict’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth, from which I learn more each time I read it. Tonight I may watch Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, of which I have always been a little nervous; tomorrow, Good Friday, I shall do what Dutch Protestants have done for at least a century: listen to the integral recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the sublime Peter Pears as the Evangelist. Saturday will as always be perhaps the strangest day in the Christian year: the tabernacle open and empty; the statues, in one’s mind as in the church, shrouded; participation in the disciples’ sense of absolute loneliness, loss, abandon, and desolation. Everything holds its breath. And then . .
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