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MESSAGE FROM FATHER LAURENCE, 6 February 2008
    LENT 2008
    ASH WEDNESDAY
    “What are you going to do for Lent?” It’s a question often asked today with a slightly scoffing
    tone. The idea of ‘spiritual exercises’ or asceticism has become so caught up with
    associations of negative religion, self-rejection or self-righteousness. Yet the question is often
    asked – it connects to a deeply felt need to be actively developing in your spiritual journey – and
    so, for us all but especially among people with a conscious spiritual practice, it is an important
    question.

    Many religions have such periods of intensified ascetical practice – Ramadan, the Buddhist
    Rains retreat or the Hindu Thai Pusam, for example. For Christians Lent, mirroring the forty days
    Jesus spent in the desert before the beginning of his public teaching, offers this opportunity for
    renewal and a recharging of one’s commitment and devotion to the Way. Lent is the annual
    season in which the Church undertakes spiritual exercises whose focal point globally is Christ
    and, locally, personally, the human longing for healing and salvation, wholeness and
    sanctification. As it synchronises with the Easter celebration, it is also an experiential reflection
    on the way this human longing is radically realised through the mortality of Jesus. Fittingly, then,
    Lent involves the physical aspects of our spiritual process.  (We should feel both physically and
    psychologically better because of a well-practiced Lent).

    But this is just why it is so hard for many modern people to understand Lent and why they
    dismiss it only as ‘giving up’ pleasures that often seem pretty harmless or childish. We need a
    liturgical and sacramental perception of things to make sense of this. Liturgy, public worship,
    lifts the individual up from the atomised state into a community. So, it is true, can a football
    match, a carnevale in Rio or a rock concert - to some degree. A liturgy goes further than these
    experiences of togetherness by deepening the meaning of the community it realises –
    ultimately not that of a team, tribe or party, but of all humanity – and also of the happy integration
    of body and mind that good liturgy acknowledges and promotes. Liturgy is about physical
    presence. It cannot be done satisfactorily by proxy or virtually. This in the end is what ‘going to
    church on Sunday’ is about too. But liturgy is much more than that.

    The liturgical cycle of the year used to be fully integrated into the social and political calendars.
    There was only one calendar for all – this had its dangers and pitfalls, too, of course –whereas
    today we have several parallel calendars reflecting our multiple and often competing identities.
    If we have a liturgical calendar in our life at all it is usually a subordinate one – work or
    entertainment usually have greater weight. Even though we have gained some personal
    freedom by being disconnected from the liturgical seasons of the Church we have also lost a
    great deal. For many today life is a grey flatland over which the artificial stimuli and distractions
    of entertainment or excessive workloads pass like indifferent weather patterns. By contrast, a
    liturgical sense of time weaves a sacred story – for Christians a historical narrative – into our
    daily and seasonal lives. As the moveable feast of Easter reflects, based as it is on the phases
    of the moon, this can also remind us that, despite the artificial environment we have created, we
    also inhabit a natural world that sings in our blood and limbic systems.

    In Lent we not only remember Jesus going into the desert to be tempted. We understand that
    we too have a personal desert to enter, one in which we learn to wrestle with those forces of
    darkness that anyone interested in enlightenment has to face. The old language of wrestling
    with Satan or spiritual warfare needs to be paraphrased today but it should not be too quickly
    dismissed because it touches real aspects of our personal growth and healing. The teachers of
    the past expressed it by saying that we ‘build up our defences’ against the powers of darkness
    through the spiritual exercises undertaken in Lent. We become stronger in dealing with the
    problems and barriers we encounter both within ourselves and in the unexpected events of our
    lives.

    So a good preparation for understanding Lent, after reading Isaiah 58,  is to read the gospel
    accounts of  Christ’s temptation in the desert – Mt 4:1-11, Mk 1:12-15 and Lk 4:1-13. These
    different accounts reflect a variety of possible interpretations and would make good lectio
    material between today and the first Sunday of Lent in four days’ time. What is Jesus being
    tempted by? What is the basis of his rejection of these falsehoods and illusions? Why does he
    emerge from the desert after his baptism, ready to begin his mission?

    A liturgical perception of time weaves our individual histories into something bigger. It expands
    our horizons while challenging the petty imperialism and territorialism of the ego. Once it has
    begun to form part of our feeling about the meaning of time it opens up a sacramental vision as
    well. This also is intricately linked to our human integrality – body and mind. To see things
    sacramentally is to see the sacred value of the physical and of the very mundane. It is to know
    that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’. It allows us to taste and enjoy the beauty
    and wonder of things without destroying our appreciation of them with compulsive analysis or
    reductionism. Especially at this time of the year in the northern hemisphere we can read the
    picture book of nature with a special thrill. In Spring we see the wonder of new life pushing up
    through the dead leaves. We see tiny flowers of cosmic beauty proving stronger than the frozen
    ground. The self-giving nature of all life and of the Word of God finds a supreme metaphor in the
    beauty of the season. Like all beauty the best way to enjoy and respect it and to feel united with
    its epiphany is to leave it alone.

    They seek me day by day and love to know my ways. (Is 58)

    In the southern hemisphere, unknown to the biblical poets, the seasonal metaphors for Lent and
    Easter add further dimension to their meanings for us today. Today when it easy for us to inhabit
    all seasons almost simultaneously, sharing these sacramental symbols enriches the sense of
    the wonder at our terrestrial home as well as of our fragile yet profoundly unified human
    existence on it.

    Lent is a time when we refine and purify the spiritual senses and identify the habits or patterns
    that pollute them. The means of doing this are the exercises we undertake in this season. It is
    not a time for self-punishment or repression. Today especially the human psyche is too fragile
    for that. But when a friend summons up the courage to tell you something you would rather not
    hear, some exposure of a fault or dishonesty you have been guilty of, do you not (in the end) feel
    gratitude for their expression of love and concern for you? It is not condemnation but
    ‘repentance’ that works to accelerate the spiritual journey. To repent means not to feel guilty
    which is a waste of time and spirit. It means to be honest, clear-sighted and courageous enough
    to change direction.

    Before changing direction it is best to pause. Lent is time above all to give more time than we
    normally think we can afford to the mechanics of our spiritual life. It is not only about giving up
    but doing something more. Sometimes the two can be nicely balanced – less time watching
    television, more time reading, going earlier to bed, getting up earlier to meditate, listening to the
    news just once a day, praying the hours more often, eating less and better, living and
    communicating more healthily. Of course, good intentions are more likely to be sustained when
    they are realistic. It is better to slow down gradually before changing direction or you may
    simply go into a spin. The aim of Lenten disciplines are to reverse the momentum of actual or
    implicit self-rejection and to allow the experience of knowing that we are loved to arise and
    envelop us. This knowledge (however it comes to us) is in fact the ‘knowledge of God’. The
    changing of momentum is stillness. Thus,

    Be still and know that I am God (Ps.46)

    Finally, or it will take you till Easter to read this, the union of the liturgical and sacramental
    sensibility is achieved through a variety of ways differently suitable to the temperament and
    level of development we possess. There is a lot to choose from – the reading of scripture,
    participation in the sacraments, other ways of prayer, fasting. The principle of all ‘self-denial’
    serving a positive end is moderation. But sometimes a period of abstinence is the best way to
    restore balance. Is there something you do to excess? Focus on that and see if ‘giving it up’ for
    Lent would help restore a moderated (and therefore enhanced) enjoyment. Are you aware of
    something you would like to do regularly and never seem to make enough time for? Call that to
    mind and see if you really want to make time for it. And don’t forget the other skilful means that
    the Christian tradition has always emphasised. Like almsgiving, which is the giving (and letting
    go) of time or money to those in greater need than you. This is especially useful in an age of
    consumerism and material anxiety. It is an opportunity to practice real giving – anonymously,
    modestly and without asking anything in return, even a good conscience.

    Or, like “good works”, an active exertion of yourself towards the undoing of an injustice. It took
    Christians nearly two millennia to realise that slavery did not fit with gospel values. This Lent,
    you might not be able to bring peace to the Middle East or reverse global warming. But you can
    help; and doing so might enlighten you to a responsibility closer to home, in the family, your
    community or workplace.

    Rather, is not this the fast I require: to loose the fetters of injustice, to untie the knots of the
    yoke and set free those who are oppressed, tearing off every yoke? Is it not sharing your
    food with the hungry, taking the homeless poor into your homes, clothing the naked when
    you meet them and never evading a duty to your kinsfolk? (Is 58)

    John Main thought that prayer is the essence of all Christian asceticism, the turning from self to
    the Other. This implies a certain depth of prayer, a depth of simplicity and purity such as the
    mantra can lead us to. So perhaps for a meditator the first Lenten practice we should joyfully
    undertake - and Lent should be an increasingly happy time -  would be to prepare better for the
    times of meditation, to be more faithful to them and to say the mantra with the greatest possible
    attention, fidelity and gentleness. Then more than ever,

    The Lord will be your guide continually and will satisfy your needs in the bare desert; he will
    give you strength of limb; you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters
    never fail.. then you will find your joy in the Lord, and I shall make you ride on the heights of
    the earth (Is 58).

    With much love in the journey we share these coming days,



    Laurence Freeman