The Giving Up of Lent

orcgg.org

When it comes to Lent, at home, we are a mixed economy household. There are some who have grown up in the catholic end of the Anglican tradition and others who are more protestantly inclined. For the former, Lent is a season in the Church’s liturgical year. It is a season for growing in love and in knowledge of God. Giving things up, or fasting, is meant to aid and abet this process. For the more protestant among us, and among our friends and acquaintances, Lent barely figures at all. It is Good Friday that counts. Easter is a bit of an afterthought.

In the excellent Anglican theological college where I trained for ordination, I knew someone who had never heard of Lent. At first this seemed surprising, in an Anglican College, but it was also quite salutary. It obliged me, as a more catholic Anglican, to wonder why we are doing Lent at all.

Perhaps such uncertainty is to be expected on Shrove Tuesday, as I write this post. It is the last day for coffee, chocolates, wine, or whatever.  Who knows what lies ahead in the way of tortuous self recrimination and personal goal striving? I read somewhere that a job contemplated is a far greater challenge than a job just begun. This is certainly true for writers and bloggers. It is also true of Lent. Once you get past the first week or so of giving up, it starts to resemble habit and the job gets easier.

The down side of this easing of the yoke is that guilt takes over. If it’s becoming easier then it’s not really giving up at all. It’s not a genuine fast. So we now find ourselves in a position of aiding and abetting the one thing Lent and Good Friday itself is designed to quash for good – personal guilt, along with a form of Pelagianism, the belief that we can get better if we try hard enough.

My more protestant friends, on the other hand, live much of the time with a sense of unworthiness and with the conviction that there is little or nothing that they personally can do about it – except repent. Some of us who are more catholically inclined will save their formal repenting until Shrove Tuesday comes round. Shrove Tuesday was traditionally the one day in the year when you were ‘shriven’ or received sacramental absolution following private confession to a priest . More protestant Anglicans do this shriving more publicly. When done formerly it amounts to confessing and repenting of manifold sins and wickednesses, something which users of the Book of Common Prayer do quite often.

So where does this leave our mixed economy household, when it comes to the meaning and purpose of Lent? There is something to be said for both approaches. On the one hand, the more protestant members feel that spiritual exercises should be undertaken solely for God and not involve a covert agenda of personal improvement. Furthermore, such exercises should be neither defined by, or limited to, a particular liturgical time of year. At the catholic end of the kitchen table, we welcome these seasons as given by God for our general well being, as well as for growth in the discipline of prayer. Ideally, whatever is given up should lead to deeper and longer periods of prayer and to the giving of alms. But it is also perfectly OK for them to lead to the betterment of our own physical health as well.

Insignificant as these theological meanderings may seem, I think our mixed economy household represents a sort of stumbling onto the real meaning of unity among Christians, and invites reflection.

Whether or not Lent is formerly observed, we could use the season to reflect on how God ‘holds’ us all in love, in both our feeble attempts at fasting and in the integrity and reverence which goes with not wanting to use the season as an excuse for putting in extra time at the gym or cutting out alcohol. Instead, we could pause in loving reverence for God.

We need more reverence for God in our lives, and not only reverence for God, but reverence for the earth, the food it yields and all who labour to produce it. We also need reverence for each other. Perhaps there are ways we could give up ‘giving up’ and start ‘taking on’ instead.

We could ‘take on’ the other members of the household in small acts of patience, or in unsolicited kind words. We could ‘take on’ the refugee, if not physically, because circumstances might not permit this, we could do the ‘taking on’ financially and by bringing their helplessness to God while recognising that we can do nothing to change ourselves or their situation without God’s grace.

We could ‘take on’ God in the shocking realisation that God ‘takes us on’. In no way does he ever give up on us. He does the same for those with whom we profoundly disagree or dislike – perhaps with good reason. What kind of giving up – or ‘taking on’ would such an attitude of mind require of us? This question alone ought to keep us busy for the next forty days.