Passiontide 2016 - The point

Having got this far without whatever it is we have decided to forgo these past few weeks, we may now realise that we didn’t need it all that much in the first place. We may no longer even like it, as I discovered ten years ago with sugar on grapefruit.

Two things emerge from this; first, that with the exception of serious addiction, getting a grip on a habit or familiar comfort food isn’t that arduous an undertaking, once we get used to the idea, and, second, that not having it has bought us a certain freedom. The freedom comes in two shapes. We will be free in respect to resuming the habit or food (come Easter day) but it will not have mastery over us, and we will be free to choose what we really want – which may only amount to some other comfort food or habit to replace the one we gave up for Lent.

The trouble with this kind of freedom is that it deceives us into yet another variation on the guilt theme; if it was that easy to give up chocolate, why did we not do something much more demanding and difficult (as well as giving up chocolate)? Herein lies another great deception. We are deceived into thinking that nothing we have done in the way of self control, or even of prayer, adds up to anything and that we are as rotten as we ever were on the morning of Ash Wednesday, and will ever remain so. From this follows the question "So what’s the point?" The answer to this question is quite simple: There isn’t a ‘point’. Lent does not have a quantifiable point. It is not about achieving goals. Rather, it is about a different kind of freedom, freedom bestowed in failure and non-achievement.

By now, we may just begin to realise that whatever has been ‘achieved’ with regard to habits and food foregone during Lent, has done nothing to make us nicer or more holy people. This suggests that the most we can expect of Lent is coming to terms with who and what we really are. Having done this, we will begin to realise that the purpose of Lent lies in freeing us into a place where we can ask ourselves, without fear or shame, what it is we really want.

As we move towards Holy Week we begin to allow this life-determining question to be framed, or held, by the tortured Christ stumbling towards the place of his execution. Who is he? And what does he want? What makes him do it? What is the point?

Again, there is no ‘point’, except that the event of his death, and this particular moment of stumbling agony, is also God’s answer to our own question. It is God’s total identification with our failed efforts and distorted perceptions of ourselves. Some of these have been imposed by other people and all of them invariably lead to more ill perceived ‘failure’, so we are left with the reality of an endless cycle of failure and self recrimination. It is the shape of our life.

So what do we really want? Our inability to even consider this question, let alone try to answer it, can lead to the hopelessness which only addiction can assuage, addiction to work, to violent or dysfunctional relationships, to youth and beauty. For the time being, these addictions counter despair, the despair which comes with being in captivity to material things like achievement, or to a self-created persona, and to all kinds of falsehood. These have mastery over us. They also embody the chronic loneliness from which we hide through addiction and ‘comfort’ food.

So the ‘point’ for Jesus lies in meeting us in the secrecy of our loneliness and of our various ways of being in denial about who we are and what we really want. He stumbles along with us in all these states of mind and heart, including whatever our despair tempts us to do in any one moment. Whatever we try to do or become during Lent only serves as a reminder of this central truth.