Magazine letter March 2024
We are a good way into Lent by now, our 40 days of fasting, or what passes for fasting these days, usually the giving up of some self-destructive habit, like sugar in your tea or chocolate biscuits. All very useful but hardly a wilderness experience! I suppose we’ve lost our sense of urgency in the conduct of our spiritual lives, we don’t generally tend to think in terms of ‘doing battle with our lower natures.’ Such language belongs to an age of hand to hand combat.
Ours is a keep fit generation. Frightened of physical collapse through sedentary life-styles we take exercise very seriously (or ought to). The idea of rowing on a machine which doesn’t go anywhere, or lifting weights only to put them down again, would have had our ancestors in stitches. But it’s our time, and it makes sense to us.
So let us look at Lent in a similar way – a time to exercise those parts that our spiritually sedentary life-styles have tended to allow to get rather flabby. The discipline to do without (here’s where the chocolate fast comes in) but also the discipline to do what we are not used to doing, reading a different kind of book, for example, one to make us think; volunteering to help people less fortunate than ourselves; making an effort to spend a little more time in the company of God, and listening to what he might be wanting to say to us. All these would seem to be very useful forms of keep fit, strengthening muscles that we don’t know when we might be called upon to use. Much like our forebears and their training for combat.
But hurry, there’s not much of Lent left – if you manage a bit of spiritual keep fit then Easter will feel all the more special because of it.
William