I used to resent Lent. In the rising glory of the spring – flowers, birds and sunshine --, in the rising energy of my youth, it told me in no uncertain terms to be gloomy, to be penitent, because I was a miserable sinner. To be miserable and in a kind of mourning for forty long days. To fast: to give up all the good things and moments of my days and ways; to go to bread and water and maybe the odd fish, when the world was full of delicious temptations to give in to. I didn’t feel like a miserable sinner: I knew I was far from perfect, but heck, basically I wasn’t a bad egg. The whole thing seemed perverse and rather revolting.
There were good moments. When I was about thirteen, my parents took me to the annual performance of Bach St. Matthew Passion in Naarden, a small ancient town in the centre of the Netherlands, where the great work was played and sung in its entirety, with break for a picnic lunch in the open air. The performers were the finest the country had to offer; and Laurens Bogtman, who sang the part of Christ, was so imbued with the spiritual responsibility of the part that he prayed and meditated for months before the concert.
Much later, a cheerful parish priest told us that Lent was a sort of spring clean of our spiritual house: confession was throwing out the accumulated garbage, almsgiving was sharing hoarded food with a neighbour down on his luck, and fasting was stopping yourself from piling up new junk to clutter the swept and garnished rooms.Such a positive view was appealing; but Lent, after all, ends in Easter, and with that it seemed to have little to do.
This year, now that Lent is with us again, a new interpretation occurred to me – new to me, though ancient and long known to saints and sages. Lent, I now believe, is the way in to the wonder of the gift. The gift is the Cross and the man upon it; the gift is the empty Cross and the empty tomb; the gift is the stupendous love described with great sobriety by R.S. Thomas:
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
The gift, first of all, is the Coming, the Incarnation. Then, the gift’s continuation is the teaching, the preaching, the healing. Further and intensely, the gift is the Sacrifice: the cup drunk to the dregs. And climactically, the gift is the Resurrection: the conquering of death, for us, the everywhere and always presence of love, for us, the continuing nearness of the bread and wine of forgiveness and renewal, for us.
For many, in this age of creeping neopaganism, all this is quite simply unknown. ‘Huh?’ The gift, for them, is not only unknown but meaningless because they have not learnt to reflect upon their human condition. But for those of us who do have some connection to the faith, the gift is often seen in faded colours, part of an old wallpaper, its annual remembrance become repetitious, ritual.
The gift, in its vast power and complexity, invites wonder. To respond to it suitably is to be overawed, to be amazed, to be very nearly perplexed.
And I am coming to the conviction that Lent is the way in to this wonder. By a cross of grey ash; by damping down our own egotistical life-force, by constraining it in some kind of fasting; by opening the eyes of our souls, to others and to God, in giving time or money; and by opening our ears to the murmur of the Spirit in praying with, as Solomon put it, a listening heart; we make ourselves capable of the wonder that can recognise and respond to the Gift.
So now I see Lent not as a contradiction of the joy of spring but as an accompaniment and an intensifying of it. The way in to the wonder of the gift.
