Lent is a time "for honesty, a realistic assessment of the human heart" (as the late Dean of Westminster Michael Mayne described it). We are invited to enter into the compelling story spelled out in these days, spelled out in a shared meal, and in God's self-giving love which "contains and unites our lesser stories, and has the power to pull them together and make sense of them."
But it's not easy, given the way the world is. Novelist Martin Amis writes, "Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think of ignorance, reaction and sentimentality as good excuses.1" While I think this is a silly remark by a man seduced by his own cleverness (and he is clever), it, nevertheless, points to something deeply disturbing going on in our culture. We live in a "post-secular" time, defined as "a call to move beyond the ideological assumption that a purely rationalistic account of the world will be sufficient." I am reminded of T.S. Eliot's lines in "East Coker" from Four Quartets.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed.
We are in the dark -- as in a theatre, the lights extinguished. I like the theatre - the empty space where amazing things happen. Lent gives us an opportunity to allow for a panic-free emptiness to grow within us. Prayer is learning to wait there in patience, to be still, to stop clutching at and fussing about life - perhaps to do a little less harm. Thomas Merton wrote, "If we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give to others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressiveness, our own ego-centered ambitions . . . "
So, what's it all for? What's is all about? Thomas Traherne's (1636-1674) word for it was "Felicity!" He wrote,
Having been at the university . . . I saw that there were things in this world of which I never dreamed; glorious secrets, and glorious persons past imagination. Then I saw that Logic, Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Geometry, Astronomy, Poesy, Medicine. Grammar, Music, Rhetoric, all kinds of Arts, Trades, and Mechanisms that adorned the world pertained to felicity. . . . . There never was a tutor that did professly teach felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences . . . We studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner2.
Lent is a time for us to aim at a certain end - the love of God -- and recover that space where there is no clutching and fussing but the grace on which the peace and felicity of the world is built. It's a time of the darkness of God. The scene is being changed. A good time.
With love and prayers
Alan Jones, dean.
