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 . .

FOR ALL YOU DOUBTING THOMASES

Worcester College

On this First Sunday After Easter, alias Mercy Sunday, I can do no better than repost, with her permission and my gratitude, today's sermon by my priestly daughter, now Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

Thomas

TESS KUIN LAWTON·SUNDAY, 8 APRIL 2018

On this Sunday after Easter, we are offered some remarkable stories about discipleship and it seems like a good opportunity to use them to reflect on our own journeys of faith.

The first, and most obvious story is that of Thomas. There is a method of spiritual reading of the Bible which encourages us to imagine ourselves as one of the characters in the narrative and really live the event from their point of view. During Holy Week and Easter, it is almost impossible not to do this. The characters are so full of life and the narrative is so vivid that we are drawn inexorably into the way of the cross as we tread the path with Jesus. Sometimes we are Mary, watching and waiting as the event unfolds. Sometimes Peter, denying we are followers of Jesus at all. Sometimes the accuser, sometimes the soldiers, sometimes the women laying his precious body to rest.

The beauty of the narrative is that it invites this kind of reading. The author of the Gospel of John is explicit when he says that he has written everything ‘so that we might believe.’ There is a profound interplay here between the written word and the way it speaks to our faith in God. John is writing the Gospel so that everyone who reads it and hears it might believe that Jesus is the Son of God. If you believe that this is the case, John is convinced of two things: that you will have found a way to have, as Jesus puts it ‘life in all its fullness’ and that this abundance of life will not end with death. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’ (John 3.16)

When I was a school Chaplain, I was lucky enough to meet a man from the Gideons who told me about his mission to prisoners. He would take the small red New Testaments into prison and distribute them with words of encouragement. One day a man came to tell him that the thin pages were the perfect size for cigarette paper and he had indeed smoked his way through Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. By the time he got to Acts, he felt that perhaps he should read the pages before smoking them. He was converted by Peter’s speech on the resurrection of Jesus and had come to ask my friend for a new copy of the Bible.

These words on cigarette-thin paper were written ‘so that you might believe’. They are words to comfort and to heal. Words to challenge and to inspire. Words which echo across centuries and reach into your heart today.

The story of doubting Thomas plays its part in this conversation between us and God. The resurrected Jesus meets his friends for the first time and knowing exactly the level of their fear and anxiety, his first words to them are ‘peace be with you.’ He says it twice. He understands.

Peace. We know what it feels like. The sunshine reminds us of it. A feeling of calm. Of beauty. Of ease. Those times in life when we are aligned with the world, in tune with the basso continuo of life. No worries to niggle us. No stress to unsettle us. No sadness to drag us down.

Imagine how deeply sad the disciples must have been. Imagine the weight of their grief. Not only their beloved friend, but their longest running snap-chat streak, the one they spoke to every day and who settled them and made sense of life; not only this but also the leader of their community, their purpose, their reason to live. All this died in them when he died. The locked doors are not only factual in John’s story. They are symbolic. In the face of grief, we lock down.

And into this, the risen life of Christ walks. Through the locked doors, breathing peace into the fear. ‘Peace be with you.’

Thomas was not part of it and the disciples are not good at explaining. They don’t really know what has happened and they are not making a lot of sense to Thomas. He needs to see, feel, hold, touch the man who made sense of his life.

And Jesus gets this. He holds out his hands and he invites Thomas to touch. This is no ghost, no apparition or wish fulfilment. This is real. Thomas gets it.

‘My Lord and My God.’

Our readings today have important things to teach us about the practical life of a follower of Jesus. John’s Gospel reminds us that we have the power of forgiveness, each one of us and there is enough in a single verse of the Gospel to give us food for prayer for the rest of the week as we reflect on our own ability to forgive. Jesus considers forgiveness to be the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it is so central to his message about how we should live that it has a central role in the prayer we say every day: ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

The book of Acts, the one which converted our smoking friend in prison, gives us a really remarkable reading in chapter 4 about how we should live as a community: sharing and giving up our own wealth so that our neighbours in Christ might be cared for, ‘there was not a needy person among them.’ (4.34) This earliest group of Christians were characterised by two things, we are told. Verse 32 says ‘now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul.’ And the following verse tells us that ‘great grace was upon them all.’

This is a powerful image of the possibilities of living the resurrection life and the church should hold on to it with joy and hope. But today’s readings highlight the contrast between this and the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion. This transformed, grace-filled life begins behind the locked doors of the upper room. And it takes doubt as its starting point.

It is not hard to inhabit the character of Thomas, because doubt is part of the journey of faith: particularly in the empiricist world in which we now live. And what our readings tell us this morning is that God knows. God knows that doubt is part of the human condition and God responds to it at the level we need: ‘reach our your hand and put it into my wounds’ (John 20.27).

God does not love us less, if we doubt. God is always reaching out to us. Continually. But at some point, we have to reach back towards God and we must trust that it is true. ‘My Lord and My God.’

COMPLETING THE TRIANGLE

Caspar David Friedrich, "Angels in Adoration"

In my two posts on prayer I wrote about the prayer of petition and the prayer of thanksgiving. The triangle, or trinity, of prayer now needs to be completed by paying attention to what is, in the tradition of the Church, considered the highest and most celestial form of prayer, the prayer of adoration.

In petition, we ask, we beg, we beseech; and we need to learn what to ask for, how to ask for it, and how to deal with the result. In thanksgiving, we say Thank you; and we need to learn about illogicality an d discretion. What is the prayer of adoration?

Latin ad-oro originally means “to speak to”, then becomes “to address a request or prayer to” and eventually takes on the meaning of “to worship, to venerate”. In Greek there are the verbs sebomai and proskunein, the latter implying a physical movement such as kneeling or prostration. Whereas the English word “worship” is originally a noun meaning something like “value-ness”, greatness, honourableness, and later becomes a verb meaning to honour, to venerate.

Somehow, the prayer of adoration is well beyond that. Why? Because it is disinterested, unlike petition and thanksgiving. It is the pure, natural condition for a created being: turning to the light and warmth of its Creator as the sunflower turns to the sun. In part it is simply basking; but there is in adoration a return movement of joy, of pleasure, of active giving. What do we give when we adore? As the Psalm says, “of thine own do we give thee” – there is nothing we can give God that did not come from Him, that is not always already His. And yet there is joy in giving back that borrowed joy.

The prayer of adoration is also contemplation. As the sunflower contemplates the sun, the human soul contemplates the living God. Often, His light is too bright for us to regard directly; so we contemplate Him in His creation. Thomas Traherne, whom I have had occasion to quote before, did so and managed to express it gloriously in human words. Others have contemplated God’s glory and have fallen silent before it. Still others have lost themselves, lost their selves, in becoming one with it, as a comet might fall into the sun.

The prayer of adoration is the prayer of the angels. It is the prayer of all those seen by St John in his vision of Revelation, those who surround the throne of the Almighty, those whose joy is eternal in their unceasing song. Nevertheless, this prayer of adoration has roots. It grows out of the prayer of thanksgiving: part of the joy of contemplating God is the immense gratitude for receiving all that we now give back in praise; for His creation, its beauty, its emotion, all that we see and love in life. And the prayer of thanksgiving, in turn, has its roots in the prayer of petition; for we are given what we first asked, or we are given what it did not even occur to us toask, or what we dared not ask. And so the trinity of prayer is complete; and the immeasurable, unspeakable, huge silent light of God is all in all.

Image courtesy of Abuto George Evangelical Ministry

SOME INTELLIGENT WISDOM

Faith, Charity, and Hope

This morning, the French Prions en église collection showed, as the collect for today’s Mass, something I recognised. It was a French version of the Collect Anglicans know as Trinity 12, from the Leonine Sacramentary, revised in the Gelasian; of which the original, 1549 Book of Common Prayer version is this:

Almighty and everlasting God, which art always more ready to hear than we to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve; Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving unto us that that our prayer dare not presume to ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It’s one I’ve always loved; and the commentary on it in Frederick Barbee and Paul Zahl’s The Collects of Thomas Cranmer is so good I thought I’d reproduce it here:

This Collect is a treasure chest, truly overflowing, of uplifting insights drawn from our religion:

·       God is more ready to hear than we are to pray. We pray too little, too timorously, and too pallidly. We seldom pray for what we really need and while we are unceasingly preoccupied with our perceived needs, we simply pray too seldom! God is a listening ear, waiting for communications which too infrequently arrive. God is the more active dialogue-partner in the “I-Thou” conversation.

·       God wills to give us more than we want and certainly more than we deserve. Can we for one second comprehend that? God does not work on the principle of distributive justice, i.e. “we get what we deserve”. On the one hand, He wants to do more for us, in our impoverished frangibility, than we can conceive. On the other hand, He wants to do good to us rather than judge us according to our deservings. If He gave us what we deserve, who could stand? His grace is neither Aristotelian and distributive, nor quixotic and mercurial. He blesses – with abundance – and does not curse.

·       We ask Him to forgive us the things that weigh on our conscience and cause us to fear to look Him in the eye. Even what seems to us, humanly speaking, unforgivable, can be forgiven by God. The reach of His mercy is further than our insight at its most layered and Freudian.

·       We ask Him to give us what we cannot even imagine asking Him to give us. Again the Collect presents the overwhelming idea that God is able and desires to give us things that we cannot fathom even suggesting: such as change within an unchanging character fault, love when we have long given up hope of it, opportunity which we have stopped even seeking, and open doors when every door has slammed shut.

ASH WEDNESDAY

I posted this a few years ago, and came across it as I was hunting for the text of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday; it still seems appropriate, if uncomfortable, so I'll re-post it now.

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

 (The upward way and the downward way are one and the same)