THOUGHTS ON A PECULIAR LENT

“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 70^th 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 . .

GO ON, QUIVER: OR, IN SEARCH OF JOY

In my rural French parish, the Roman Catholic Church’s current trends have varied results. The priest, a charming if hyperactive little Algerian convert, has distinctly charismatic tendencies. These alienate a number of bourgeois parishioners, but to my amusement the elderly peasant folk seem quite to enjoy them. They like the interruption of the Mass at the Peace, and turn cheerfully to each other for a handshake or a kiss; and they sing the rather appalling mock-folk hymns without turning a hair.

Before the current Year of Mercy, the emphasis was on Joy. RCF, the French Christian (officially ecumenical) Radio, changed its signature phrase to “la joie se partage”: joy is (to be) shared. And a week or two ago, a hymn told us “Tressaillez de joie!” (quiver with joy!). It was sung dutifully, rather spiritlessly, by a large and dutiful congregation comprising all ages. And it’s been making me think about Joy ever since.

First of all, there are terms which don’t normally enter our active vocabulary, sometimes for historical reasons. When I taught university courses in literary history, we used to spend some time considering the word, and the concept, “honour”. Unless one comes from the Mediterranean and points East, this is not a word much used except in the odd stock phrase. My students, interestingly, found “dishonour” much easier to understand than its opposite.

Thinking about the quivers of joy, it occurred to me that Joy is perhaps such a word.  We know it mainly in expressions or titles – “the Joy of Cooking” – and C.S. Lewis had the good fortune to be able to play on his wife’s name in Surprised by Joy. But is it part of our active vocabulary? Pleasure, yes; happiness, yes; relief, yes; but joy? It’s a very strong word, a very deep word. Perhaps almost nothing that we feel is strong and grand enough to be called joy; or perhaps it is but we have become unused to employing that particular word for the feeling. Parents, when they first hold their new baby; a lover, when the beloved first returns the emotion; a father, when his drug-addict kid turns up clean for good; a convict, upon hearing that he has been amnestied; a tennis-player, upon quite unexpectedly winning an almost impossible tournament; is it joy?

This leads to a further question: if we are to quiver with joy, what do we quiver about? The answer, of course, is there, in the hymn; it’s there, in the Bible itself. The answer is Salvation. Our Salvation. But how many of us, outside the Evangelical or Charismatic world, really know what that means, and feel as well as know? And yet it is what Jesus talked about, all the time. It’s what He preached, on the lakeshore as in the synagogue. The Kingdom of God – the reign of God – is here and now. The Messiah whom you’ve been waiting for all these centuries, he’s right here. The Chosen People’s relation to their God has been restored.

Yes, well. But we are not Israel; we are the Gentiles, the goyim, the Nations to whom St Paul was sent to preach – what? That they are the new Israel, and that the God who was previously Israel’s alone is now theirs also. And that because of that, Israel’s salvation too is now theirs also. What does that mean, though? Jesus is the Kingdom of God, in-carnate, made flesh and blood, given to us, rejected by us, killed by us, and resurrected to put an end to the definitive reign of Death. That faith in Him is the new Law. The Ark was empty: as a French commentator put it, you cannot put God under house arrest. What was concrete and present was the Law. And in the new dispensation the Law, too, is found to be a hollow container; Jesus is the new Law. He doesn’t give laws; he is the Law. And he has destroyed Death.

Fine; but we die anyway, right? Yes; but not definitively. He went through death – and what a death. We can only follow him there. But he rose again, as the Creed says; and our faith is that we too shall rise again, recognizable but transformed.

Is not this reason enough for a swooping and embracing joy? Well, it would be, if we could believe it from day to day. But in real life, we think about re-ligio, about the binding-together-again between us and God, mainly as a set of moral duties in which we are never up to scratch. Not a new Law; rather an endless catalogue of good deeds we ought to be doing as gratitude for salvation. But it comes to the same thing. And the Church, let us face it, does little to help. Even the remarkable current Pope, in spite of his text’s title Gaudium et Spes (joy and hope), spends much of his time fustigating  not only the world but the faithful for sins of omission and commission, for lack of care, of love, of mercy. In other words, the Church tends to be more John the Baptist than Jesus; yet at the same time the faithful are told that their behaviour must be exemplary and that they must convert the world by the beauty of their lives.   

Parents know that children change their ways for the better more easily when encouraged and praised than when growled at and  punished. The mainstream Churches need, I think, to learn from the evangelicals to concentrate more on both the need for, and the joy of, salvation. Call it Rescue, if you will: we were all drowning on a leaky life-raft in the ocean, until we were plucked out and take to a safe place. As a civilization, we were starting to think that there was Nothing: Life’s a bitch, then you die. (How people can think that and feel cheerful is beyond me.) And then this luminous man turns up to rescue us, and we kill him; and then he turns up again, on a beach, frying fish and smiling. Now do we feel joy?

Tomorrow is not just Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, before the carne, vale, the farewell to meat for forty days; in England it is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent when we are shriven – we confess our sins and receive forgiveness, so that we can start the exercise of Lent with a clean slate and a joyous heart. Whether we confess privately to a priest, publicly in the General Confession during a service, in our own closet or in our own heart, an intelligent confession will leave us both begging for and receiving forgiveness, ab-solutio, the washing away of all that clogging dirt. So we can begin Ash Wednesday shriven, forgiven. And for forty days we can study to be quiet, we can fast a little or even a lot, we can pray and occupy ourselves intensely with the love – received and given, given and received -- that is Joy. 

"Heaviness may endure for a night; but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30)