God is not seasonal

When Easter falls early, or the weather is too cold to safely plant the potatoes on Maundy Thursday, the gardening year gets off to a rather ‘discombobulated’ start (to use a favourite expression of my mother’s). But while it is relatively easy to adapt to seasonal disruption where growing vegetables is concerned, the same cannot always be said for other seasons, the ones that mark the year in ways which affect us personally, Christmas and Easter being the two most significant. These two seasons are also connected to the two pivotal seasons of the year, the winter and spring solstices, when daylight is at a turning point. They affect our moods. They also speak of a God who is always with us, in times of both light and darkness.

Christmas will, at least for the foreseeable future, always fall on the 25^th of December, but Easter is a movable feast. This year it falls early enough to create a general sense of disequilibrium, or emotional ‘discombobulation’. We have hardly done with Epiphany when Lent is almost upon us. The Christmas chocolates have only just been finished and yesterday I found a couple of minced pies, somewhat past their sell by date, in the back of a cupboard. I threw them away. They would have been perfectly OK heated up but the season for eating them is over. They do not fit the mood of the moment which is already coloured by anxiety. I am not yet in the frame of mind for Lent. I have been worrying about this for the past couple of weeks.

Anxiety is the first temptation we face at this time of year. It was, incidentally the one which Jesus himself faced initially in the wilderness and which arguably informed that whole experience. Was he really the Son of God? If he was, surely there was no point in allowing himself to starve to death before his work had begun? Perhaps he should just settle for being a famous wonder worker … What to do? He was not ready, not in the right frame of mind for doing the work he was called to, with the sacrifice which it would entail, or so he was tempted to think.  

When it comes to Lent, I am tempted to think that the right frame of mind involves at least wanting to give something up, or do something, which would make me more ‘disposed’ to God, a better Christian perhaps. There is so little time, between the end of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday (about 2 weeks, in fact) for wanting to somehow be different or better. But these puerile anxieties have no place in the overwhelming mad generosity of God’s salvation plan for each one of us which, incidentally, has nothing to do with being a better religious person or anyone other than who we are. God is much bigger, much wilder than our self preoccupied worries can possibly allow us to imagine. He loves us most in our humanity.

Perhaps Lent would be a great deal more fruitful, and less discombobulated, if we were mindful and accepting of our humanity and of the humanity of others. Of special concern are those people who have endured a kind of Lent for most of the year, or even for a large part of their lives. Some have long term mental health problems. Others have been recently bereaved. All are living through a time of wilderness and temptation of which most of us have little or no experience. Giving attention, through prayer, or through physical presence to someone who is suffering; loving them, not because we want to be better Christians, but in their humanity, is what Lent is really about. We meet Christ in their humanity, and in our own if we will allow it. So our shared humanity and suffering has much to teach us, if we will only pay attention to it.  

This is how God pays attention to us, regardless of the season. We are loved in our humanity, in what we are going through right now, good or bad. We are loved in our day to day ordinariness, not in the persons we think or wish we could become. God loves us in the full knowledge that we will probably never become that person, nor perhaps should we. The imperfections which make us the persons we are, are also the wounds and bruises we carry around in life. On the whole it takes a life time to learn to tell the difference between what is a wound and what is an imperfection or a ‘sin’ in ourselves, let alone in other people.

All wounds, and the imperfections they generate, are also Christ’s, because he has chosen to make them so. For this reason, the season of Lent is also always Easter. Nothing is particularly tidy or seasonal in the way God relates to human beings.