The Giving Up of Lent

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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.

In Our Right Minds

We are only fully human when we forget to take ourselves seriously. The same goes for solemn occasions involving large numbers of serious individuals. In fact, one could argue

that serious individuals coalescing  into solemn enclaves create what we call a self interested and self sustaining system. Systems are not fully human, and this week’s Church of England Synod gathering was an example of how inhuman systems can ultimately be their own undoing..

For one thing, it revealed, if only for a moment, that a person’s underlying fallible humanity will occasionally slip through the cracks in the system and reveal itself in broad daylight as, for example, when an individual makes an all too human mistake. Truth is often revealed through paradox, as when a bishop acting through some kind of subliminal divine prompting, presses the wrong button when the crucial vote is taken, thereby making the system look a little more human and, as a result, even more ridiculous than he himself must have felt on realising his mistake. I have some sympathy for Bishop Christopher Cocksworth. He was technically challenged (something which happens to most of us from time to time) so that for a moment his humanity broke through and led him to inadvertently do the right thing, even though he apologised for it profusely later on.

Perhaps all great changes in history begin with such minor mistakes. In this case it was a kind of inversion of Benjamin Franklin’s ‘for want of a nail, the battle is lost’.  Such mistakes at least reveal the thinness of the glass casing which keeps the system together in a spurious kind of unity, requiring that the humanity and integrity of the individuals involved be trussed up and kept out of sight.

Bishop Christopher Cocksworth’s all too human mistake also invites us to question at what point does the system as a whole cease to be human? At what point, and why, did it cease to function in the way it was ordained to by its founder? The purpose of the Church, and the authority given to its bishops, being surely to preserve and cherish the whole human race, beginning with its own members, as the embodiment and revelation of Jesus Christ.  Somewhere, the system has overtaken and enslaved, or ‘bound’, the true Church.

This being the case, I think it is safe to say that many of us would like to see a Church whose authority system has been turned upside down and inside out by its founder – for its own greater good. In other words, many of us would like to see a commitment to loving service of all God’s people which begins with the de-systemisation of power. A humble questioning of the nature and purpose of real authority in the Church might be a good place to begin.

One of the symptoms of systemic power at work in the Church is the idea that power is to be exercised primarily in the interest of maintaining unity, something of an anachronism when we remember that the Triune unity, on which we base our Christian faith, is one of inter-relatedness and dynamic, or continual movement into a deeper knowledge and love of the other.

This is the knowledge which admits to itself that it understands, empathises or, to use today’s vernacular, ‘gets’ who that person is. ‘Getting’ something about someone means touching on the truth of that person in a way which can only cause us to love them more.  When persons, powerful or not, have been swallowed up by the system they themselves have created, they need the rest of us to minister to them in the deepest sense. Ministry is about being as Christ for the other, irrespective of their power status or lack of it.

So we look at the powerful from the same vantage point as that which enables us to ‘get’ what it means to be powerless and marginalised. The powerful, as we see them in formal synod settings, or fail to see them because much of the real work goes on in closed meetings, are as needy as the powerless, but in a different way. Their minds need ‘re-clothing’, so that when they come to sit at the feet of Christ, like the man described in Luke 8:35, they need not feel ashamed at having lost touch with their own humanity because they have literally ‘come to their senses’. It is their senses which need re-clothing.

The senses, understood in this way, are what lead us to take reactive measures, to act ‘instinctively’ towards those who are on the margins of our common life, not because we fear them (although we do sometimes) but because their freed humanity threatens the personal security which the existing system affords the powerful. This is at the heart of the controversy which currently divides us. The security, and the system itself, depends on doing things in the way they have always been done, including adhering to outdated Church law and to habits of mind which come with lifeless, loveless ways of reading scripture. All of these things are done by appealing to authority and thereby asserting power. The extraordinary outcome of this week’s Synod suggests that power only comes with real authority and real authority, as Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, is given from above. 

Heat

In the early morning light, a kangaroo appears in the paddock across from the house we are staying in, here in Australia. We are told to expect kangaroos at dawn and then again at dusk. A whole troop (the collective noun for kangaroos) appears later in the afternoon – and I miss it. I spot the single but miss the collective. At night, it is the ‘collective’ of the grass bull frog which makes itself heard from the creek nearby. You feel the effect of the frogs’ composite existence, rather than see it. The single and the composite are constrained at this time of year by heat and sudden chill, by light and almost light.

We went out yesterday. There was heat, intense, heavy, bright, with only the occasional breeze for respite. The heat slows you down. It forces you to attend to the moment. There is neither time or energy to pass too quickly to the next, or to dwell too long on the previous, and on the past. Everything is held, almost imprisoned, within the heat and this present moment, including the tragic young woman who, for a while, shared our picnic space.

The heat, which has increased today, served as an initial reminder that she, and millions like her, can never be entirely of the past, even though she remains a memory. Her parting words to us were “Bye. See you again, maybe”. I doubt that this will happen, and yet her words and the memory they evoke, will endure as a present moment, a reminder of the heat of the Australian summer and of our responsibility for all whose lives are made winter by their memories.

She talked a great deal about her life but she was not in a condition to make herself understood and yet having to pay attention to her, to the memories which had brought her to this moment and to this place, made the incoherence of her speech comprehensible. She needed to be heard, but had grown used to being ignored. She had probably been homeless. Quite a few homeless people are billeted to this outlying area of Melbourne. She needed to be understood without feeling pressed or in any way accused.

I kept my sunglasses on, so as to avoid direct eye contact. Sunglasses were a kind of prop for me, the listener, buying me a bit of personal space. I could respond to her sideways on, so allowing the jumbled flow of her words to bypass me without, I hoped, causing her offence and without obliging me to engage with her in a direct way. Direct eye contact means that we move into another person’s space, if only momentarily, and this obliges us to take responsibility for them, whether we like it or not.

Taking responsibility for someone who is suffering begins with allowing the suffering person to occupy our inner space, or consciousness. In the case of this tragic young woman, allowing her to occupy my inner space initially meant ignoring the impulse to physically distance myself, and those I was with, from her, which we could have done by choosing an alternative spot further along the river to have our picnic. It also required that each of us resist the urge to ‘protect’ my small grandson from some vaguely perceived malign influence.

This vaguely perceived influence is what defines our fear of the ‘other’ when it comes to suffering. Our own unease about the woman in front of us was a microcosmic rendering of the xenophobia felt towards millions of homeless people, refugees, or any person or group who make us feel threatened because they are not quite like us. We feel threatened because in some cases we have been allowed, and even encouraged, to think of them as dangerous. But most significantly, they make us feel threatened because we do not know them as persons. This ignoring of their personhood renders us powerless to help them in the immediate moment.

Later, when the heat finally became too much for the woman (she was wearing a leather jacket and torn leather trousers), I was saved from my feelings of inadequacy in the face of her brokenness by her simple parting words,  “Bye – See you again, maybe”. One of the most damaging effects of our fear of other people who are suffering is that we can miss out on their redemptive words and on the hope they bring.