Dear all,

 

Well today is Ash Wednesday and next Sunday the first Sunday of Lent. The guiding motif of this time is "Jesus in the Wilderness". The time of forty days is highly symbolic of course. It rained for forty days in the great flood story and for forty years the Jewish people were wandering in the Wilderness, and there were forty days between the resurrection and the Ascension in the book of Acts. Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days. The flood story is a bit different but the others are all times of spiritual discernment and growth, when people were faced with a series of encounters with the spiritual world, where their characters and ways of being and doing were formed in the light of those encounters. So it is for us. Taking this as our motif for Lent then, Lent becomes a time for consciously "putting ourselves in God's way" initiating and nurturing our encounters with God to the end of forging or reforming our characters in accordance with those encounters. As Thomas Merton says, Lent is not a time of punishment but of healing. 

 

So what will you be doing? As already advertised there are meetings going on in various parts of the Deanery where we can meet to discuss our faith ecumenically. For private or group use there is also Bishop Tom's Lent book "Luke for everyone" which is available in church for £3.15 to take us through Lent with a daily reflection on the gospel text. If you are not keen on that (why not??) why not start a discipline of daily prayer if you haven't already got one - or try a daily silent waiting on God?  In a more traditional vein, you might look at your cluttered life and see where things might be getting in the way of your relationship with God and try cutting them down to make space. The Sunday service is also a weekly encounter with God. If you are not in the habit of weekly attendance why not determine to come more often. Jesus in the wilderness came to a mind as to what character and direction his ministry would take not in an easy cost free way but through spiritual turmoil and temptation, but don't forget he was driven to that place by the Holy Spirit.  

 

As we are in Lent it seems a good time to talk about something that has mostly dropped off the radar of most western Christians as a spiritual exercise - that of fasting. Let me say here and now that I don't fast (what do you mean - we noticed!) at least not consciously but there is a definite case for saying that it has spiritual benefits. The Orthodox would say that there are definite spiritual benefits; There is the pious platitude that says that it reminds us of those people who don't have enough to eat in the world. I can get that thinking - it may work for some - but more pertinently from my point of view, quite simply they say it is easier to pray on an empty stomach. 

Did you know that the Orthodox fast twice a week - on Wednesdays and Fridays - all through the year, not just in periods like Lent!  Usually it is not a full fast, but it is restricted as to what one can eat - a vegetarian diet basically. Then there is the old Catholic practice of only eating fish on Fridays which is the nearest western equivalent. There is also a high church/catholic tradition that you do not eat before the Mass, something funnily enough that I do adhere to, not in any superstitious way, but it came about originally that I was so sick with nerves before a service that I couldn't eat, and it does seem odd to have a meal before a supposed feast!

Fasting was accepted practice in 1st century Palestine and the Hebrew belief that human beings are a....deep breath...... psychosomatic unity (there is no body/soul dualism - our bodies, spirit, soul are interdependent) necessarily means that what we do with our bodies automatically has a spiritual dimension so fasting and prayer went together in a natural way.

This non-dualist approach is one of those things that I know to be true when applied to how we act with each other (By their fruit you shall know them), but has taken time to root itself in me in any concrete fashion when applied to smaller things like posture during prayer or fasting etc...I am not a natural ascetic. It reminds me of an apocryphal exchange between a young new Christian talking to the old Anglo-catholic priest. "There is no satisfaction to be gained through earthly pleasures and passions Father!". The old priest replied "You just can't be doing them right" 

    

 

There was one thing I forgot to mention about last week's Old testament reading from Exodus that saw Moses wearing a veil because his face was shining from exposure to God. Now you may have seen old representations of Moses in art or in stain glass windows that depict him having horns. Some are fairly discreet little wisps of light coming from his head. But at my old church of St. John's Margate, Moses had two massive great Bulls horns attached to his head in our stained glass windows. The reason for this is that the Hebrew word "to shine" is very similar to the word "to have horns" and when the story was first translated into Latin it was translated as "having horns" by mistake - hence the strange artwork!