LAETARE: IT'S GRACE, STUPID.

The fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare from the Psalm that begins "Rejoice". It is a pause, as it were, when we may breathe in the midst of our intense self-discipline -- yes, well. Most of us are not very good at intense self-discipline, and so we can feel mildly guilty at not having earned Laetare.
Which brings us to the whole topic of Lenten guilt. Somewhere around Ash Wednesday many of us fully intend this year to "do a good Lent", fasting, praying and giving alms with sincerity, assiduity and regularity. By the time of Laetare for many of us this lovely plan lies in ruins, and we feel guilty.

It is worth stopping to reflect on the similarity of this experience with that of New Year's Resolutions.  And with that of weight-loss plans. For these last, the permanent success rate, it has been proved, is between 2 and 5 per cent: the figures may be the same for New Year's and Lenten resolutions. Even if we consider slimming to be a form of vanity (which it is, health excuses notwithstanding) and Januarius to be a pagan idol (which he is), we are still left with the shards of our Lent.

 The key, of course, lies in the possessive pronoun. Our Lent. My Lent. Not selfishness: I wanted to bring God the offering of a "good Lent", because I love Him and want to do something for Him, as one does for a loved one. Uh, huh. Niet. Time and again, with a divine smile or a heavenly tear, God raps us over the knuckles and says "You've done it again! You've misunderstood me again! I don't want your immolated oxen, your roasted rams, nor do I want your good Lent!"

Right, Lord: what do you want, then? "I want you to realise, once and for all, that contrary to what you humans keep saying it is more blessed to receive than to give, and also a great deal more difficult. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my complete love. I have given you, and keep on giving you, my only-begotten son. I was under no illusion as to what you would do with him. But I knew that once you had done that, I could turn precisely that horror, that evil so typical of y'all, into the greatest good, for you. So look at what my Son said to Nicodemus, that intelligent believer. 'God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but so that it might be saved through him. He that believes in him is not condemned; he that does not is already judged. The world did not accept the Son because men of evil deeds prefer the dark to the light.'"

So we should work at doing good deeds? "Yes and no: what He went on to say was 'but whoever does truth comes into the light.'" Doing truth. Not doing good deeds. Doing truth. It sounds odd and illogical. Is truth something you do?

Here we are with the shards of our Lent. But Lent is still going on. And we have failed. Again. So we smile, say "Thank you, Lord, for the lesson," and get up and go on. Knowing that we can do absolutely nothing; that we have been given the gift of God's love free and without charge, and that it does not matter a tinker's fart whether we fast or eat, write cheques or save, and go to Church or not. God did not check up on all those things before deciding whether we were worthy of his love. What we do, being loved like that, is work at fully realising it, taking it in, letting ourselves be overwhelmed. That, I suspect, is what "doing truth" is. Being love, God's love is always the same as our love, which is why we can love him back. Being God's, it is always also different. Always a little unsettling. But not -- pace much modern church rhetoric of the "naught for your comfort" kind -- demanding. I'm not sure God ever demands. I think he gives, and waits for us to receive and accept. Learning to do that is "doing truth". And it results in rejoicing. Laetare, indeed.

WHAT KIND OF NEW YEAR?

El Greco, the Blessed Virgin Mary

A new year, for most people, implies resolutions and an attempt to improve one’s life. Yet as a Catholic text I saw this morning said, the beginning of a civic year (the Church’s year, don’t forget, starts with Advent) stands in the sign of the Mother of Christ. It may be useful – and, in a way, a relief – to remember her reaction to the unexpected visit of an archangel: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it unto me according to thy word.” Instead of specific resolutions, with their known limited half-life, we might think of making these words, and this thought, our own for 2018: a year to be spent in the silence of listening, whatever the world’s noise around us.

REAR-VIEW MIRRORS AND WINDSHIELDS

Looking back on 2016 one can of course cite many horrors and many disappointments. But when one either looks more closely at  what’s happened in the world at large, a large number of blessings also become apparent: in India 800,000 volunteers planted 50 million trees in one day to help the country reforest 12% of its surface, while for the first time ever, 93% of the planet’s children learnt to read and write. One does need to be careful about absorbing “news” from media, especially television, internet and even print. Newspaper editors long worked on the principle “if it bleeds, it leads”, and this has now spread to almost all media. Social media, on the other hand, are sometimes even worse, as they can spread the steaming private rage of individuals faster than any (other) epidemic. One of the rare exceptions is the French daily La Croix, which resolutely continues to inform rather than titillate or judge, which invariably explains both sides of difficult questions, and which pays as much attention to good news as to catastrophes. (Le Monde, of which someone who worked there in the Fifties once said, “It’s not a newspaper, it’s a university”, still informs very well but has moved further away from impartiality – leftwards – and is temperamentally gloomy.)

For individuals, looking back on a year gone by is usually a bit nostalgic, slightly (or deeply) sad, rueful, or cautiously thankful. It’s a collective version of the eve-of-birthday mindset; it’s the painful travail out of which new year’s resolutions will shortly be born.

None of this should properly apply to prayer.

God does not ask us to apply ourselves more energetically to doing better at everything. God does not ask us to judge the rest of the world, even politicians. God does not ask us to hate our nasty enemies with more intensity and if possible to wipe them off the face of the earth. God does not ask us to be revenged on those who did ill to us or to our loved ones.

God asks only one thing: that we return His love. With every fibre of our being. And this is largely done not by increased activity but by allowing Him to visit, to move in, to take over. It’s almost passive, but it does take concentration: we ask Him to open our doors and windows so that He can enter and take up residence.

Once we embark seriously on doing that, resolutions become superfluous.



The illustration is William Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" (1849-53) in Keble College Chapel, Oxford. Note that the door on which Christ knocks is overgrown and clearly unused to being opened, and has no handle: it can be opened only from the inside. Our inside.

IN A NEW YEAR

Last Sunday, we were reminded that the Last Sunday After Trinity, now known as the Sunday Before Advent, and known in Catholic circles as Christ the King, is in fact the last Sunday of the liturgical year. So tomorrow, the First Sunday in Advent, begins a new year. And it begins so quietly. One little candle in the darkness, in the storms, in the long nights of snow, in all the depths of the world. About that we can talk tomorrow --  but what about this new year, then? There should at least be a little celebration, a sense that renewal is not doomed but possible, a consciousness that, as someone put it, we fall down ten times; but when we get up the eleventh time, that’s faith. And hope.

   Many years ago, in early January, Schultz published a Peanuts cartoon featuring Lucy looking crossly at the sky and saying, “We’ve been cheated! It’s not a new year! They’ve given us a used year!” Sometimes January’s new year can feel like that. But the new year of Advent should not. No matter where we are, how we are, in that new year the year can be new. In our hearts, in our minds, and – let’s bring back that entity the Enlightenment downplayed – in our souls, a spring is possible. Somebody wrote that the fig tree is such a beloved symbol in the Bible because it burgeons, it gets leaf-buds, very early, yet its fruit ripen late. So if in the spring of this new year we bud early but then not much seems to happen, let us not be sad or discouraged: there will be a summer, and there will be fruit.

   And a final word about “the season” – “the holiday season”, “the shopping season” and all those things we love to get angry at even as we are part of them. A new year suggests a few good resolutions. Could we perhaps begin with the resolution not to be defensive about Christmas, not to bitch at bad music in shopping centres, not to grouch and grinch and complain? A resolution to live this season – which is as much happily pagan as it is, for us, also happily religious – with confidence and pleasure, on whatever scale pleases us and those we love? Such a resolution would help increase the joy of the world in expectation of the dies Natalis, would allow us to smile at our families, our neighbours, and strangers, and to pass on whatever help we can spare to those whose new year begins in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. In newness of life.