Lent 2016 - Confronting Fear

I read in Saturday’s Guardian that a woman who had tripped and fallen while crossing a road was ignored by two passing cars, before being run over and killed by a bus whose driver had not noticed her lying there. Did all three of these drivers perhaps half notice the woman, but for fear of getting involved (the legal and practical ramifications of doing so would have been considerable) simply pass on by? Selfish individualism, as the Guardian article suggests, runs on the fear of getting involved.

Selfish individualism is no new thing, as the story of the good Samaritan also reminds us, but what does not immediately register with the reader of that story is the acute loneliness of the two who pass by on the other side. We get a sense of this loneliness in the incident which took place on a city street in the UK only a few days ago. The drivers of the cars and bus, like the religious experts in the gospel story, seem disconnected from other people’s humanity, and perhaps even from their own.

The selfish person almost always ends up being the loneliest and the most alienated, as we often see with some of the elderly people in care homes whose families seldom visit them, not because they do not care about their relative, but because their love has been absorbed, sponge-like, over many years by a self obsessed and often fearful individual.

The loneliness of the self obsessed individual could also become the plight of the selfish nation. The selfish nation only thinks short-term and takes what it can from the wider family, the family of nations. In certain contexts its short-term thinking has been compounded by the  fear of what might happen to the nation if it started to risk itself for the sake of the powerless. The plight of the selfish nation returns us to the plight of the selfish individual who is too timid or self obsessed to be pro-active about taking in refugees, for example.

It seems strange that all of this fear is often confused with religion, or with the lack of it. Lack of religion is sometimes seen, by those who do not understand what religion is about, as lack of moral fibre, or a version of the same. But one cannot help suspecting that, for them, the real problem with religion is that it involves passion. Dispassionate morality, or virtue, is easier on the conscience; suffering and need become someone else’s problem. Who knows where passionate love for a loving God might take them?

This being said, the critics of religion have a point. Religious people are often blind to their own self obsession and the threats which it poses when it is cloaked by religious individualism. Religious individualism feeds on the same fear as any other kind of individualism. It feeds on the fear of those whose religion is strange to us, with the result that we feel we must protect ourselves from whatever we think they might do to us.

One way around this problem would be to take advantage of the most powerful resource which all people of faith have at their disposal – prayer. Prayer takes one of two forms. It is the intimate conversation which the human being has with the creator God who is loved and trusted by the one doing the praying. Prayer also involves desiring the highest good for all human beings, beginning with those whose religion is different from our own.

Christians are about to enter the holy season of Lent. I think many Christians would greatly value the prayers of Muslims for our highest good. Many of us will be praying for them during the coming weeks. Here are two prayers which Christians say together on the Sunday before Lent begins.

Lord, who has taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth, send thy Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted dead before thee; grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

Merciful Lord, grant, we pray, to your faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I hope that those who read this blog will continue to say these prayers throughout the coming weeks for all Muslims of good faith, as well as for themselves, and that Muslims will join us in saying them for us in a spirit which is true to their religion: