“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy.” Thomas Merton

The word Lent derives from the word lengthen and my guess is that this refers to the lengthening daylight we enjoy at this time of year brightening towards the eventual coming of spring, the annual miracle of re-birth as the sleeping world re-awakens again.

Lent is a strange phenomenon in the church year; everyone knows what it is but almost nobody knows what it means – why it is so persuasive to our hearts, to  our pre conscious or un rational selves.
As our anthem illustrated; lent is a time when in the Christian calendar we remember Jesus renunciation of the devil and, seeking to replicate that heroic struggle against evil, tradition dictates that we, like Jesus, turn our faces against those temptations of the flesh.
We give up our guiltiest pleasures – well supposedly.
Shrove tuesday, pancake day is our thin western approximation of the carnival – the great blow out before the fast; carne vale farewell to meat. And on Ash Wednesday we know that all good people go to mass and receive the cross marked in ash on their foreheads.
I  consider it as a strangeness beyond strange that Christianity choses to ignore so many of the things that Jesus is reported specifically to have spoken against, and wearing ashes as a sign of fasting is one such, recorded in that extraordinarily brilliant and far reaching chapter of Matthew that I read earlier (a passage that also contains of course the great prayer of Jesus). That same passage also says dont disfigure your faces as hypocrites do but wash and let only God be aware of your piety…
Lent is the remembrance of the time in the wilderness, The temptation of Christ by ‘the devil’ – a power I dont personally believe in and which is certainly alien to the Judaism Jesus knew – but l leave this to one side for a moment, to consider the wilderness – the motif which recurs in the Hebrew Bible the Old testament, the void – the great waters over which the spirit broods, and across which Noah sails, the wilderness into which Abraham and Sarah must wander, and Hagar and Ishmael are cast, the wilderness into which the people of Israel must suffer for their forty years of coming to terms with the reality of God, years which we are told In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old, the valley of bones into which the spirit breathes new life;  all visions of wilderness which we must be prepared to wander if we are to undergo that transformation which is our  spiritual right and need. For as Meno wrote
“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” except by leaving home, the comforts of the known for the wildness of the unknown, and that is I think what is at the hearty of the concept of giving up we are expected to undergo at Lent.

Letting our habits fade, letting go of the ropes of our confinement by habit and trying something unknown… “That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost… The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know, or only think we know, what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?” Writes Rebecca Solnit and makes me wonder if perhaps Lent has something other than lengthening and more like longing at its heart? Longing for transformation, for grace, for God.

I once stopped a visitor as she was leaving my home church at Brixton  she was upset because the visiting minister had been disappointingly droning on about some outmoded and boring aspect of conformist orthodoxy, some ‘Churchianity’, we spoke, in a desolate fashion, as you do.
She said she wasn’t sure that she believed in God – she said that what she experienced was more ‘a kind of longing’.
I’m sure that she was closer at that moment to God than most comfortable believers ever get.

If giving up some small pleasure can release you from the tyranny of the known. Good luck to you. If giving up smoking or drinking for forty days serves as a springboard to better long term health, well that’s a great thing  (although I cant exactly see how it coincides with religion or spirituality, but perhaps thats my failure). And by the way I’m not saying that abstinence or resisting temptation is not worth trying or that it cant be spiritually valid – I just wonder if it might not be braver to try, what was the phrase: ‘love, grace, wisdom, inspiration.’

Why not take something up during lent? what about the ‘loving kindness’ practice we tried today?  Where by you consciously practice loving; first your self, then a loved one, then a stranger – then someone you dont like. They say something repeated twenty times becomes a new habit.

Thomas Merton said “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy.” Thomas Merton