Vicar's Letter - February/March 2005 - Fasting and self-denial

When Lent begins in a few days’ time, little will change for most people, even most Christians.  Once, the whole nation would have entered a time of simplicity of one sort or another, but, today, even in churchy circles, there will be hardly more than a perception that the colour has changed on the furnishings and the sombreness factor might have intensified at the Liturgy.

Periods of fasting and self-denial serve a much wider purpose than just a pious demonstration of commitment.  By slowing down the pace of life a little, they permit us to reflect on whether we are heading in exactly the direction we wish to be travelling.  Ironically, such an exercise is even more necessary in the modern age when such things are in serious decline.  As demands on our time shout at us from every direction, it is easy to lose sight of a sense of purpose, pragmatically responding to the moment without any overall strategy to guide our actions.

Furthermore, a time of simplicity enables us to appreciate all that we have.  How many people only notice how important the pc or the washing machine is to their routines when they break?   A period of simplicity, as it were, switches off some aspect of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what life would be like without it.  In a world where convenience is piled on convenience, we can easily take for granted all those things that enhance our world.  All the time, we focus on what we haven’t got (six-figure salary, yacht, hacienda &c) and fail to perceive how fortunate many of us actually are.

This is not just a question for devout people learning a proper sense of gratitude to their God for His blessings – though that is important.  I often wonder how many people arrive at the Eucharist – the Thanksgiving – with a longer list of gratitude than intercession: come to say thank you for more than they come to request of God’s bounty.

It is, however, important for secular society that people have a sense of the richness of their lives (when their lives are rich).  When our consciousness is dominated by what we have not got, we can feel frustrated at our failure to thrive as well as we perceive that others do.  This can, in turn, lead to a sense that somehow life is failing to provide the opportunities necessary for us properly flourish. 

The truth of the matter, of course, is that there will always be something more we can want and if we constantly focus on what we have yet to achieve, a notion of failure will be our constant companion.  If, on the other hand, we learn to appreciate what we have got, then most of us will realize just how fortunate we are.

We might also begin to understand how reliant we are on those around us for our own comforts.  There is a notion that somehow we earn our successes purely on our own merit; but few if any make their progress without a lot of others doing a lot of hard work as well.  Even in the mundane things of life – eating a meal or making a telephone call – we depend on whole armies of others organised into a complex infrastructure.

Clearly, of course, we need to have a sense of impetus to climb new heights and perhaps progress relies on a sense of impatience with the status quo.  Looking forward and imagining what might be is an important part of human endeavour; but from time to time, we need to change the focus of our perceptions and assess what we have already and what summits we have already conquered.

For Christians, Lent is a time for this.  How we choose to simplify our lives will be a matter of individual choice; but the intention should be to remove at least some of the clutter of our day so that we can enjoy a clearer picture of the reality of our lives.  When the fast comes to its end at the First Mass of Easter, the result should be a renewed sense of gratitude for all that we have and, maybe, a clearer notion of where we wish to be going.

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