In a longish lifetime I’ve found
that I’m never original; so there must be others who have had a peculiar Lent
with a shambolic ending. You know who you are. It’s mainly for you that I’m
writing this, and of course for myself.
When one gets serious about one’s
faith, or mainly so, one of the things one dreams about is a Good Lent. With a
little real fasting, with lots of profound prayer, with charity and sharing: a
shapely movement of the soul’s days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. And then reality comes along.
Even when I was young and Lent was
not much practiced – except for the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday, a Dutch
tradition – I was always exercised about the fact that Christianity had chosen
the most glorious time of year, full of bird-song, fields of flowers, trees in
bloom, fresh green everywhere, the sap rising, for its gloomiest meditations.
As a child and later a teenager I did not feel particularly sinful, so
penitence was hardly a topical concept; I was sorry for what those people had done
to Jesus, but when I was introduced to the great 17C Dutch poet Revius’s sonnet
“’Twas not the Jews who crucified Thee, Jesu . . . ‘twas I, my Lord, ‘twas I
did this to Thee”, my reaction was Well, no, it wasn’t.
When you get older you realise
first that maybe it wasn’t but in the circumstances it might well have been:
how do I know that had I been a believing Jew or a Routine-bound Roman corporal
in Jerusalem on that day I would have had the intelligence and the courage to stand up
against the crowd?
That, however, is not the point of
the poem or the meditation it reflects. And as you go deeper into the faith we
inherit you come to a new awareness: doing it to anyone is doing it to Him. OK,
you and I have not crucified anyone lately, we’re not into torture and murder;
but there are many ways of doing the dirty on others, and every one of them
comes out of a bag of nails. Giving comfort to a grieving stranger or relative
is comforting Him; withholding love from anyone is withholding it from Him.
As you look at your ageing self in
the mirror of hindsight, you see a far from beautiful Dorian Gray. So you
acquire the dream of a Good Lent that will maybe, with some serious effort,
make you ready for Easter. And then, as I said, reality sets in.
Reality provides us with all sorts
of distractions, excuses, and daily messes that really muck up our Good Lent.
And when Easter rolls around we know that we have not fasted enough, the
theological or devotional texts we were going to read remained untouched beyond
Chapter 3, our prayer has been subject to John Donne’s distractions even more
than usual, we didn’t go and visit that old person in the next street or
village we’d promised ourselves we’d see, we didn’t even go to church on Good
Friday, our CD player was on the blink so the St Matthew Passion was out, we
ended up feeding passing friends from far away, and here we are, supposedly
meditating by the tomb in perfect silence like a Victorian painting of the
mourning Marys, but in reality shopping for Easter food, hiding eggs, doing
e-mail, and a hundred other unworthy things. What a mess.
And then there comes, at the moment
when one does pray, a still small voice that says, “That Good Lent you so
wanted to have, supposedly for Me – did it occur to you that that was entirely
your idea, conceived by and for you? I do not necessarily want your Good Lent
any more than I want smoking bulls’ meat on the altar: if you can look at your
life and see the bits that really don’t go with my Father’s love, and if that
view makes you miserable enough desperately to want Me, Us, to change it
(because you now know that you can’t), then, little lad, you will have had a
Lent that’s good enough for Me.” And you realise that you have been given a major
lesson in humility. And you get ready for Easter’s celebration, with a rather
tremulous joy in your heart.
ὁδὸς
ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
