I wonder what, if anything, each of you have decided to do to mark Lent? I know many people have a standard Lenten discipline which they find fruitful. Equally, I am someone who changes practices each Lent, rarely choosing to do the same thing and using it instead as a time to experiment with new ways to pay deeper attention to my spiritual life and to God.
As we move deeper into this year’s Lenten journey, I’ve been reflecting on all the different ways I have used Lent in the past, and how what I have chosen to do for Lent also shows me something about how I understood God at that point in time. During my teenage years I thought that Lent meant giving up my absolute favourite thing: chocolate one year, my favourite ice cream the next. The problem with this approach to Lent was that I think it subconsciously led to me making the assumption that it was God who demanded this sort of discipline – that God was a stern taskmaster and to be a ‘good’ Christian was to be earnest, driven and dutiful and not spend time enjoying oneself, which when you think about it, doesn’t sound much like good news at all!
Now I am not saying that taking on a challenging discipline for Lent is wrong, there are still years when I choose to take on something quite difficult, or choose to give up something I enjoy. What has changed is my understanding of what I am doing with that discipline.
Faith, at its heart, is about a relationship between humans and God, and so to deepen our faith we can either work on understanding God better, or we can work on understanding ourselves better, both will aid and deepen our spiritual journey. My teenage problem was that I was undertaking a discipline that was very good at helping me understand myself better but mistakenly, I was thinking that I was learning something about the nature of God.
Some Lenten disciplines, like my teenage explorations, are about getting to know ourselves – the ways we respond to challenge, our own self-sabotaging voices, the way we respond to the inevitable failure of our willpower and our own strength, what our ‘ego’ looks and sounds like – all valuable lessons in developing spiritual maturity. This sort of experience is essential to a life of faith in that it helps us to develop the skill to discern between our wants and needs and the nudging of the Spirit within us, or that we are capable of more change and transformation that we thought was possible.
The danger lies in doing these sorts of disciplines thinking that we are learning something about God. Imagining a God who therefore demands self-sacrifice and difficult endeavour before we can be deemed worthwhile – the God who feels like the stern school mistress, never satisfied, or the distant judge who demands perfection and will punish anything less. A God who expects us to enter the Kingdom through our own strength, goodness and work.
When we confuse the drive for self-development and self-knowledge for the way God works to make us at-one with Godself, to bring us into God’s reign, or, to use the technical term “atonement”, then we run into the problem of how to reconcile a gospel of love, freedom and hope with a task-master, puritanical God.
So if atonement is not about conforming to a strict, external moral code, then what is it? I think we get a clue in today’s reading when Jesus says “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work”. In this reading, Jesus’ work is self-defined as a ministry of healing, and I would suggest that healing is a better metaphor for God’s work in Jesus than the more common courtroom metaphors, which in today’s world tend to mislead more than they enlighten.
So if Jesus’ ministry, and therefore the nature of God, is about healing and inviting us into wholeness, this then offers us another way to enter into the discipline of Lent, one which seeks to understand the nature of God’s call on our lives. This might begin with the question “Where do I feel blocked or stuck?” Anger, despair and resignation are often our signposts here, pointing to aspects of our life which are ready to change and grow – which need the liberating love of God to breathe new life into them.
We can then ask ourselves what one small action, if done regularly might bring a breath of change into that situation, might allow something new to grow, might help us feel freer and to live into the promise of life in all its fullness. There might be a clear practical action you can take – to work at reconciling a strained relationship or indeed to end a damaging one; making time to stay in touch with friends; or to join a group working at a cause about which you feel passionate, and this becomes your discipline. At other times we may not see a way forward or through our difficulties and then our Lenten discipline might be to sit with God daily in prayer, silence, walking or art, and practice offering our doubts to God, and trusting, like Abram in our Old Testament reading, in the promise of God’s faithfulness.
This process of listening to our blocks, or as Ignatius Loyola would call them, our desolations, and praying for God to move into them constitutes one of the central spiritual practices of the Jesuits, called the Examen, which is essentially a guided reflection through the joys and sorrows of daily life and a process of praying God into the whole of our lives – its shadows as well as the parts we feel are acceptable, trusting that God will move us into wholeness, as is God’s promise. Trusting that God is present in our weaknesses and struggles, indeed is particularly present in those very places we find darkest, and that with courage and persistence we can open ourselves to God’s promised presence and experience helps us to understand just what it means to truly live ‘in Christ’.
As an aside…If you are interested in exploring this as a practice, or if you are already familiar with it, taking the time out to practice it, then I’d invite you to come along to our Monday Lent group, who will be looking at contemplative prayer tomorrow, and the Ignatian examen the following week, but for now I would just like to leave you with the possibility that God, instead of calling us into ever greater effort, is instead calling us into greater love and freedom than we often ever imagine.