Friday 11 March 2011

Lent: our annual spiritual refresher course

My sermon for Ash Wednesday:

Every celebration of Mass begins with the Penitential Rite, as we call it. We prepare to meet Christ and receive Christ in the Eucharist by pausing for a moment, right at the start of Mass, and turning our attention to our faults, our weaknesses, the areas of our life where we fall short of the standard of Christian holiness. We apologise to God and we ask him to give us strength in our future struggles.

Lent is a whole season of the Church Year dedicated to this aspect of Christian spiritual life.

The mood and tone of Lent is penitential rather than joyful or festive, but that doesn't mean that it's supposed to be a depressing and demoralising experience. It's meant to be an exercise in honesty about ourselves, a time to examine our attitudes and behaviour, to renew our commitment to God, and to take some concrete steps to purify our often selfish and malicious motives.

The readings today, especially the gospel, suggest three main ways of entering into the spirit and purpose of Lent. The first way is by fasting.

Fasting means disciplining our ordinary physical appetite for food and drink and cutting down on the occasions of convivial eating-together: partly to remind ourselves that the physical and material side of life is secondary to our spiritual side and our relationship with God; partly as a gesture of self-sacrifice offered to God as a way of making up for our sinful actions (doing penance); and partly to symbolise our "appetite" for God.

What I mean by that is that when Jesus went into the desert to prepare for his public ministry - the origin of the forty days of Lent - he removed the "distraction" of bodily nourishment so as to concentrate on the spiritual nourishment he received from solitude, prayer and meditation. During Lent we're supposed to imitate Jesus' example to some extent at least.

Second, Lent is a time for almsgiving: an old-fashioned word, maybe, which means giving of our material resources, but also our time and energy, to those in need. 

The recipients of almsgiving benefit in an obvious way. But we also benefit spiritually in that almsgiving helps to make us detached from money and possessions: the best way to be really detached from something, after all, is to do without it or give it away. It directs our attention away from our own wants and needs towards those of other people. It's a practical expression of sacrificial Christian love.

As with fasting, there's a long tradition of treating almsgiving also as a form of penance.

Sometimes, when we've done something sinful, we can't go back in time and literally undo it. But what we can do is make up for it by giving away some of our money or otherwise making a sacrifice for the sake of the poor. There's a long tradition of seeing almsgiving as making amends for past faults and restoring our friendship with God.

Lastly, Lent is a time of prayer, or, perhaps, since we're meant to pray continually, a time of more intense prayer, or a time for making a special effort to get into a more regular habit of praying.

Prayer, if we're honest, is an activity that we find easy to neglect. We're often busy, or preoccupied, or tired. There are all kinds of reasons why prayer can easily become neglected or rushed. But more than any other activity, prayer maintains our bond of communion with God, and when prayer slips down our list of important activities, the bond we have with God is weakened.   

So Lent is a time when we consciously correct that particular fault - we try to put a bit more time aside to communicate with God and to bring him back from the periphery of our lives to the centre, which is surely where he should be.

None of these penitential practices are gloomy or off-putting in themselves. They've always been seen as essential to maintaining a real, living friendship with God and a healthy spiritual life. So if we've forgotten or neglected them over the last twelve months, we can approach the season of Lent, now that it's beginning again this year, as a spiritual refresher course and an opportunity to re-establish some good habits that can only deepen our love for God and our neighbour.

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