Re-visiting the blog after a 2 month absence (I’ve been
working on a new book) is a fast forward exercise, lurching from pre-Christmas
to one week into Lent. It feels like a pale replica of how I have always
imagined travelling at the speed of light, compressed and outside time. This
year’s transition from the post-Christmas season to the beginning of Lent makes
life feel compressed, as it might be in inter-galactic space travel. It has
left little room for mental or emotional adjustment. We are travelling at the
speed of light towards light.
Easter being early this year, there has been very little
time to re-adjust to the season of Lent. Epiphanytide ended rather abruptly
less than 10 days ago and Lent has suddenly arrived with the first snowdrops. The
wilderness season is upon us wrapped into the season of gestation and first
growth. In this particular wilderness season, the one which presages ultimate
and eternal life, we are obliged to think about what must come first, which is death.
This week’s Observer
Magazine features an article about death (‘Memento Mori’ by Emma Beddington).
It is a brave article. It also invites Christians to
distance themselves momentarily from what we believe about death and re-engage
with this unpopular subject from another perspective, the one which many people
are most used to, which is simply the fact that ‘WeCroak’.
‘WeCroak’ is now a phone app which reminds its user of
the truth about their own mortality several times during a single day. Lent is
a season for dealing with truths that most of us would rather not face, especially
the ultimate truth that we must all die. You could say that it is a rehearsal
period for death itself.
The only really frightening aspect of death is that, when
the moment comes, we may not be quite ready for it, so it is essential to come
to terms with this fact if we are not to be taken unawares by death. The purpose
of Lent is to provide a space for facing the
reality of our own mortality and of the passing of all things, both good and
evil. The phone app is useful here because
it simply says, as it pipes up in its random way (there is no set time-table), that whatever you are doing or thinking or saying right now, this precise
moment could be your last. What, therefore, would you really like to be doing,
thinking or saying?
Facing into death is also essential for knowing how to
live. We face into death by facing into the reality, or truth, about the present
moment, or of our present set of circumstances. Am I at this moment bored? Or hungry?
Or short of sleep? How do these feelings and states of health colour my
responses to the needs of others? The last question is the one that matters
most because our lives are bound up with other lives, especially those we deal
with on a day to day basis.
This is not to suggest that Lent is a time for repression
and arduous discipline aimed at some kind of mind enhancement or dubious self
improvement. It is a time for defeating the kind of death which destroys the
individual from within and then goes on to destroy society and the world we
inhabit. Every individual is responsible for the greater whole.
We begin to address the questions which pertain to the
present moment by throwing out old habits of mind which have passed their ‘sell
by’ date, so to speak. What we thought yesterday about any given issue or person
pertains to memory, and after a while memory can become skewed. Memories need to
be revisited, and this may not always change them for the better. The truth of
a memory sometimes has to be revealed as worse than we had thought it was.
Facing into this truth is also a kind of dying, dying to the lies we have grown
accustomed to living with.
Lent is wilderness time, patterned on the forty days
endured by Christ in the desert when he would have faced into the truth about
himself and his life’s purpose – and questioned it. Lent is a time for
questioning and for facing into doubt. The biggest questions are invariably
presaged with the word ‘if’.
For Jesus, temptation also came as doubt: “If you are the Son of God, turn these
stones into bread (you know you can do anything and you must, of course, take sensible
measures when it comes to your own comfort and wellbeing)”. It came as “If you are the Son of God, jump off this
great height (and show them all who you really are. You know you won’t die – or
do you?”)
Lent invites doubt. But we need doubt if we are to know
the truth about ourselves, and hence about the purpose of our life and of our
own mortality. Lent obliges us to seek out and face into doubt, as we
return to our own particular wilderness, to our compressed memories and to the
truth about what we are doing, thinking or saying in the present moment. The
good news about Lent is that we are never alone in our memories or in any of our doubts.
