Loss

Lent is a time of year for personal makeovers; diets, detox programmes or exploring new spiritual pathways which might help with managing anxiety and stress. All involve a paring down of one kind or another. But such a universalist approach to the season doesn’t have to involve a person in any meaningful engagement with it. In fact, self improvement programmes, of which giving things up for Lent is only one, demand all the attention and will power of which we are capable, so not much remains for looking at the deeper things in our selves which might need to be given up, or at least looked at in a different way.

Fasting seasons, when undertaken in a way which is truly healthy, are more about getting rid of destructive mindsets than they are about losing weight. They exist to help us to change those habits of mind which get in the way of reality. For Christians, this means getting rid of character traits which disrupt our relationship with our selves, with other people and with God. When it comes to relating to our own selves, the reality consists not so much in getting rid of what we think is bad about our personality, or about our bodies, as facing the truth about our giftedness and what is beautiful in us, and with our potential for goodness. In other words, it involves coming to terms with our potential for making the lives of others good.

If we are to speak of sin, in relation to our own personal thoughts and actions, it is the denial of the beauty and goodness of which we are capable through God’s grace that invariably messes up our lives and relationships. So whatever we choose to give up in relation to how we look, or how we think of ourselves, will have to be done for the sake of coming to terms with reality, with how we look to God and what it is in us that he sees and loves, even when we are damaging ourselves. Giving things up for Lent now becomes the response of love to love’s invitation to accept the love of a gracious God. It follows that if we have damaged our bodies or our minds by destructive habits and negative thinking, the response to love’s invitation will begin with wanting to repair that damage. This requires that we first embrace loss.

Embracing loss involves memory because loss has to do with the passing of time. Over time, all losses pare a person down to the bare essentials, from the initial separations which occur in childhood to the final separation of death. It is time and the way we do our remembering which makes them so painful. Children leaving home, for example; we can brave out the loss at the time but as the years go by we feel it more acutely. They take with them a part of ourselves. They are flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Their history is also ours and something in us is ripped apart by their leaving.  

Divorce, retirement, imprisonment and bereavement; all of these losses and separations also rip us apart inwardly. They create painful gaps in our own history. They are losses which need God’s love to be spoken into them, to be heard as something real, and experienced as healing. Otherwise, the love which is spoken will be no more than an echo. Losses are only made good when love is audible, when there is the opportunity for us to reconnect with where we were in our lives, or in a particular relationship, before there was a disconnection, before we ceased to hear love as it first was. This is not about returning to an idealised past. It is about reconnecting with the real person and moving on with the person we have always known into a deeper present. By this I mean the fullness of the present moment and the goodness which it brings when love is able to be spoken truthfully again and heard. It is what God does with us during Lent if we will allow him.