Thursday in Lent IV - Lucy Gardner

Tutor in Christian Doctrine, Lucy Gardner, gave this homily at this morning's Mass.

Most people know that Christian teaching has something to say about life. Fewer realise that the Christian life is also about death. It is about dying to our idols, and about allowing them to die to us. It is also about putting death into perspective.

Viewed from the perspective of Easter, death has been destroyed. Its finality has been rent open and it can no longer define us or hold us to ransom. But we still have to face it.

Viewed from the perspective of Easter, death is something that happens in the middle of life, and not just at the end. At baptism, we die to sin and rise to new life.

Viewed from the perspective of Easter, death is also an everyday experience. Each morning we are called to die with Christ in order to share in his victory and enjoy his gift of life, to the full and for ever. Each evening we pray with Simeon that we might be permitted to depart in peace.

If you think about it, from the moment we are born we are dying. But for Christians this is not a tragedy, because eternal life can begin in the here and now precisely because dying can also happen in the here and now. And personal holiness has something to do with learning to live with this, learning to live with our own dying.

Preparing someone else for their death is, I think, one of the greatest acts of human kindness. Preparing others for death, not only in their last days and hours, but throughout their lives, is one of the greatest services the Church has to offer, and being part of that is one of the greatest privileges of her ministry.

It is also a very necessary service in a culture which distorts death, on the one hand by ignoring it, shutting it away and clinicalising it, and on the other by glamourising it in treacled drama or bloody violence on our screens.

In order to perform this service, however, we need to be prepared for our own deaths. We need to be practised in dying with Christ to our distorted, idolatrous selves. We need to be practised in viewing everything through the death and resurrection of Christ, from the perspective of Easter.

As we wait for Easter, the Spirit prepares us to die and rise with Christ. The Spirit trains us in our own dying, trains us in viewing everything from the perspective of Easter, trains us in personal holiness. In so doing, the Spirit also trains us to prepare others for their deaths.

Wednesday in Lent III - Fr Damian Feeney

Fr Damian Feeney, Vice-Principal, gave this homily at the Mass on Wednesday in the third week of Lent. The readings for the Mass can be found here.

By anyone’s estimation, seven hundred years is a long time. If the Psalmist is correct, that’s ten lifetimes, end to end. It’s a hard period of time for us to comprehend. In 1310 (seven hundred years ago), fifty-four members of the Knights Templar were burned at the stake in France for being heretics, shoes were (finally) being made for both right & left feet, and Duccio's Maestà Altarpiece [see above], a seminal artwork of the early Italian Renaissance, was unveiled and installed in Siena Cathedral. Seven hundred years is a ballpark figure for the time which elapsed between the writing of our first reading, from Deuteronomy, and our Gospel reading, from Matthew. In that first reading, Moses exhorts the people of Israel to observation of the laws and customs which he was to teach them, as this would constitute obedience to the will of God, and demonstrate wisdom and understanding to others, who could be sure that here was an enlightened, civilised and God-fearing nation. Such observance and obedience also pointed to the proximity and even availability of God to his people. And thus was the benchmark set, for seven hundred years – and I might venture to suggest that over such a period of time, habits become engrained, especially if the people did as Moses asked, and told and taught the customs of the law to their children, and their children’s children.

Not surprisingly, then, the passage from Matthew comes as a shock. Suddenly, in the face of seven hundred years of habit, there is Jesus. To be fair, not as an abolitionist, but rather, as a fulfilment of the Law – that which completes. We may take a still broader view, that he teaches, reveals and bestows the perfect justice of God: Paul, in his letter to the church in Rome, says that ‘…Christ is the end of the law, so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes.’ [Romans 10:4] In other words, Jesus is the last word, as well as being the first. It is part of what is meant by his being Alpha and Omega. He, indeed, transcends the Law, and it is his fulfilling, and therefore supplanting of the law, which becomes the norm by which we live. In fact, the word ‘fulfilment’ is here multi-dimensional. Jesus does not merely bring the law to completion, but broadens, deepens and enriches the term ‘righteousness’ so that it refers not merely to legalism but to his very person.

When we ponder the impact of these statements of Jesus, we get a glimpse of just why his words were controversial, how his claim to be the fulfilment of the law threw down a gauntlet to those who listened to him, and what a risk they took in following him. And if, for just a moment, we can measure a sense of that risk, perhaps it enlivens our own faith and response, not merely to our understanding of where Jesus stands in relation to the Mosaic Law, but to the whole of history, the whole of creation itself. We stand on the shoulders not merely of seven hundred years, but of two thousand or so more – two millennia, where faith in Christ has been more or less normative, and when the claims made for him were not only accepted, but often imposed and enforced. We now live in an age where we must decide afresh for Christ, in the presence of any number of alternatives – for he is Alpha, Omega, beginning and end, the fulfilling of the Law – and so much more besides.

Tuesday in Lent III - Fr Damian Feeney

The Vice-Principal, Fr Damian Feeney, gave this homily at the Mass on Tuesday in the third week of Lent. The readings for the Mass can be found here.

Our readings point to the quality which we believe, and most naturally hope, that God will display towards us, and towards the whole of creation – that of mercy. Azariah, stood in the heart of the fire, reminds God that he is a God of mercy, and of gentleness, who grants deliverance to his people. Peter is reminded by Jesus that his capacity to forgive must be infinite, and the parable which follows reminds us that as God forgives us much, we should be ready to forgive the relatively small slights that are done to us by others. Every Mass we celebrate uses the words ‘May Almighty God have mercy on us…’ – a form of absolution I prefer because it doesn’t do to assume God’s mercy – as the parable reminds us. It’s only when the debtor – who, by the way, has amassed a debt which would make merchant bankers tremble – more like a national than a personal debt – falls at the king’s feet in abject despair, that the king’s heart softens. But soften it does, and this immense sum of money is cancelled. This makes what follows all the more shocking, as the one who is forgiven, forgetting all that has gone before, cannot find it in his heart to forgive the most trivial of debts. In that moment of harsh pomposity and abuse of power, the first debtor blows it. Word reaches the king, and his anger is complete, and absolutely justifiable.

‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’ – words we utter at least three times a day. Our understanding of the mercy we show derives from our sense of what God in Christ has done for us – taken on, and disposed, of, the massive weight of sin which is part of the consequence of our humanity – and which, compared to the day to day injuries we may suffer, would otherwise paralyse us. All of this would be enough, but as Bishop Edward King reminds us, ‘God will not only check the consequences of our sins, but even turn them into blessings.’ This is an astonishing and radical claim – but in God’s economy it is possible, and true. And we play our part, by being merciful, by cancelling wrongdoings, by not insisting on the last ounce of what we might consider justice. Our mercy needs to be generous, even in the smallest of things - if we would change the world – because it needs to hold to the same reckless, generous, wasteful mercy of our Lord.

Lent IV - Fr Damian Feeney

This homily was given by Fr Damian Feeney, the Vice-Principal, at the Solemn Mass for Lent IV. More photos from the Mass can be seen here.

Famously, Phineas Fogg travelled around the world in eighty days, thanks to the vivid imagination of Jules Verne. His journey was brought up to date a few years ago by Michael Palin, as the ex-Python began a new career which would see him become one of the great travelogue writers. Fogg undertook a wager that he could travel, by land and sea, from the Reform Club in Pall Mall, traveling east, until he arrived back at the Reform Club, having circumnavigated the globe. Michael Palin achieved the same – or rather, he failed by a few yards. When he returned to the Reform Club on Day 80, he arrived to find that the Club was closed for refurbishment, and that no-one was there to let him in, thereby causing an embarrassing end to the series, and no doubt something of a logistical enquiry at the BBC as to why no-one had checked this basic information in the first place.

That small glitch apart, the thing which in my mind unites Fogg and Palin is that fact that they chose to undertake a journey which began and ended in the same place, but encompassed the world in its scope. They were both to return to the Reform Club – but surely it cannot have been the same place to them, possibly ever again. Their minds had changed, perceptions broadened, assumptions challenged, experiences enhanced. Each had journeyed to the far side of the world, and back – and between the beginning and the end there were stories, cultures, personal encounters, setbacks, frustrations, even trials. They could not return to base unaltered. They were changed people.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, we are reminded that

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

The parable of The Prodigal Son is another such narrative. It is the story of a journey which begins and ends in the same place, but a place which experience is to change. It is a highly sophisticated story, which means that it can be read in any number of ways. The son, only penitent because he is hungry, seeks to manipulate his Father but is overwhelmed by love. We are told nothing, but can assume, the sorrow and worry of the Father during the son’s absence. The Father, forgetful of his son’s lifestyle and wastefulness, is simply glad that he is safe, and has returned to the fold. The brother, patient and industrious, methodical and loyal, and deeply resentful of the mercy being shown to his idle waster of a brother. We can sit with all these characters, and identify with them just a little bit, and we can learn. Perhaps my favourite reading of the parable is that the Prodigal Son is actually Jesus himself, leaving the Father with his share of the Kingdoms grace and healing, going to a far country, and shedding those gifts upon humanity with reckless generosity before returning, broken and naked, to the embrace of the Father. It is a compelling, and beautiful reading.

Like Fogg and Palin, the Son returns to the place he started. But nothing is the same. He has been to the far country, has been changed by his experiences, and now sees his starting point not as a place of frustration but as a place of refuge. He cannot have been prepared for just how different a place it would be, however. He had envisaged a place of censure, of conditional love, of servanthood; what he gets is a place of joy, of celebration, of love. He sees the place for the first time, and it is beyond all his planning and his imaginings. He discovers a place where his assumptions have been turned upside down. He thought that his prepared speech would win a measure of forgiveness; he discovers rather that the forgiveness which was in place long before he uttered a word is the key to his own genuine repentance and reconciliation – a world away from the negotiation and transactional role playing he had thought would be necessary. For the first time, he discovers a place which is authentic – where he understands something of the true nature of his Father – a nature present all along, but to which he had previously been blind. The old ‘transactional’ order is to some extent still present in the words and anger of the older brother, who withdraws his good will when he realizes that the true love which the Father displays is, to our way of thinking and his, so manifestly unfair. He has remained in the same place. We are never told whether he eventually showed his face at the party. What we do know is that he has an equal place in the Father’s heart and the Father’s love.

How difficult it is to understand God’s love on this basis. We expect a love which imposes conditions – a love on our terms, which can be withdrawn when we are hurt, or when that love is thrown back in our face. But the Father will have none of it. His love is present, and especially for the loveless, that they might be come lovely. That love is one of the characteristics of the place that we thought we knew, but in Christ discover fro the first time – a place where love expressed in total mercy, is the balance of rights and wrongs, where forgiveness is both lightening fast and total, in a way that disarms and shames us.

We will be regarded in our parishes as (as Paul told Corinth) ‘ambassadors for Christ’, who is, of course, the ‘image of the unseen God.’ Through Jesus, we perceive the Father, and the Fathers actions, and the Father’s love. Perhaps the hardest and most alarming though of all about ordination is that we will have to model this love – a love which sweeps all before it, a love forgetful of who did or said what, who was irresponsible or prudent, but which will enable people to ask why we are so ready to forgive. I would love it to be said of me at my funeral that I was too ready to forgive. That reckless generosity of the Father is alarming and prophetic, and digs at the roots of transactional way of living which we erect as a defence mechanism so that we are less vulnerable, less prone to suffering. Today Jesus challenges that, by showing us not only the Father, but the place which seems familiar, and which we thought we knew, but with the eyes of faith we recognize to be the Kingdom which that Father has prepared for us, and which we discover, after all our striving and journeying, has been ours all along.

Lent III - The Dean of Worcester

The Dean of Worcester, the Very Revd Peter Atkinson, a former Principal of Chichester Theological College, preached at the Solemn Mass on the third Sunday of Lent.

There is a tailor in Singapore, or possibly Hong Kong, who once a year sends me an advertisement to say that for a few days in the following month, he will be available at a prestigious hotel in central London, and that if I care to present myself he will take my measurements for a suit at a price which I will not be able to resist. I have, for the past twenty years, resisted; but nonetheless I applaud Mr Chang’s tactics. There is just that much extra incentive to offer myself to his tape-measure, knowing that the opportunity will only be there for a few days; and that, who knows, next year Mr Chang may have retired, or will be dead, or will not write to me, and I shall have irretrievably missed the chance of appearing in his pin-stripe worsted. Mr Chang, his letter subtly implies, does not really need my custom; he’s doing me a favour by being in London at all; but I on the other hand (so his letter quietly suggests) badly need Mr Chang with his tape-measure and scissors.We might think that there’s something of Mr Chang about God in the reading from Isaiah this morning. ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near’. There is some pressure in those words. And there is more pressure in what comes next: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways”, says the Lord’. The Lord has other matters on his mind; we are not his sole concern; and if we seek him some other time, it may not be convenient; he may not be available.But that of course would be absurd; God does not fly in from elsewhere, and fly out again; if he is accessible to us at all, then that is not limited by time or circumstance, let alone by divine whim; he is the God of love and compassion, and therefore must be available ... whenever we want him.

But that’s not quite right either. If God is not a bespoke tailor with a precious timetable, neither is he a shop assistant, humbly at our disposal whenever we choose to stop by. ‘Can I help you?’ says the shop assistant. ‘No thank you, I’m just browsing’, we instinctively reply; summoning him only when we’ve decided what we want. Is that the nature of our relationship with God: browsing, and only calling him over when we are ready to make use of him?

The truth of the matter lies, I think, in the reading from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. ‘God is faithful’, we read, ‘and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it’. ‘God is faithful’: that is the point. We must not read that whole sentence in such a way that we hurry over those first three words. His not allowing us to be tested beyond our strength, his providing a way of escape so that may be able to endure it: those are vital and saving truths, but they stem from what comes first: ‘God is faithful’. It is because God is faithful that he is neither like a Hong Kong tailor with his hint of take-it-or-leave-it; nor like an obsequious shop assistant, only too happy to oblige whenever it suits us; no, he is faithful, he is constant, and in that faithfulness, that constancy, there is the call to us to be faithful, to be constant, in return.

Inscribed on the bell of another theological college, which must not be mentioned here, are words from the First Epistle to the Thessalonians: πιστòς ό καλων ύμας, ‘he who calls you is faithful’. It is, you see, a theme of St Paul. ‘God is faithful’. ‘He who calls you is faithful’. There is a faithfulness in his calling, and a calling in his faithfulness; he calls us, he summons us, to reflect his faithfulness back to him.

Where is the Faithful God in this morning’s Gospel reading? ‘At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”’ Two apparently recent disasters: an atrocity carried out by Pontius Pilate, and the accidental collapse of a building; in both of which innocent people died. Were they innocent? - that was the question. The theology which the Book of Job had criticized centuries before was still alive and well: these people died, therefore they must have deserved it. It is a theology still alive and well; witness the callous remarks of certain American evangelists following the earthquake in Haiti. It is a theology alive and well, and it gives Professor Dawkins and his friends plenty of ammunition; but Jesus disowns it. Were they worse than the people who did not die? No. That is his emphatic answer. But he has something to say in addition; and this tells us something about the faithfulness of God. ‘Unless you repent’, says Jesus, ‘you will all perish just as they did’. His words, of course, were spoken into a specific situation: the situation of first-century Jerusalem, bubbling with rumours of insurrection, and rabble-rousers claiming that a rebellion against the might of Rome was bound to succeed. Why? Because, they would say, ‘God is faithful’. God had promised a throne to David, and that meant that Caesar must be toppled from his, and that meant that an armed revolt was guaranteed success – guaranteed by the faithfulness of God. ‘No’, says Jesus, ‘there is no divine guarantee, God will not sign you blank revolutionary cheques; and unless you think again – unless you repent of this folly – you will come to grief. You will die on the edge of the sword, or under the collapsing walls of Jerusalem, and that will be something you have entirely brought upon yourselves; for the faithfulness of God is not of that nature’.

God does not benignly underwrite all our projects; and that is something we have to learn, quite as much as the people of Jerusalem. Here again we need to hear the words of the Lord in Isaiah: ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways’. God’s thoughts were very different from those of the people of Jerusalem, with their thoughts of armed rebellion. God was faithful to Jerusalem, but faithful with a faithfulness that was also a calling: a calling to repent, a calling to think again, a calling to submit their thoughts to his thoughts, and their ways to his ways.

There is, I believe, a particular temptation to those called to serve God in the Sacred Ministry of his Church, to believe that his thoughts are always our thoughts, and his ways our ways. It is often rooted in a defective idea of vocation, which puts too much emphasis upon the inward personal sense of being called, and not enough on the external confirmation of that call by the mind of the Church. So God’s vocation becomes ‘my vocation’, my precious gift from God, which he has, so it would seem from the way some people talk, entirely handed over. It is very surprising to me learn what some deacons and priests (and bishops too, for all I know) count as part of their calling: a calling to this or that large and prosperous parish, a calling to this or that Oxbridge chaplaincy, callings to canonries or appointments by the Archbishops’ Council. Whenever I assist in the appointment of a priest to a living, I long to hear of how they feel called to the dull, day-in-day-out repetitive routine of pastoral ministry, the doing of the same things again and again (but always trying to do them well), the calling to spend and be spent in the service of God without much regard to career-planning or professional development. Sometimes priests do speak in that way; but not always. I once interviewed a priest for a post, and he told me that God had called him to be a leader. When I asked him, as I always do, what books he read, he had to think for a bit and then he said he had read an interesting book comparing the leadership styles of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. I never did find out which of the two styles he thought was going to be of more use to him, but I doubt that it was God’s thought that he should be like either of them. The fact is that God does not hand over his vocation; his vocation never becomes ‘my vocation’ as if it belonged to me; it remains his vocation, his calling, and his thoughts are not always our thoughts; the ways in which he leads you and me are his ways, not ours. But he who calls us is faithful.

Lent II - Ian Boxall

The Senior Tutor, Ian Boxall, preached at the Mass on the Second Sunday of Lent. The gospel was Luke 13:31-35:

Foxes and chickens are not a good combination. So when the two come together in today’s gospel, we know that things don’t bode well. ‘Go and tell that fox,” Jesus says of Herod Antipas, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.” But then, almost in the next breath, as if deliberately to provoke the fox, Jesus calls himself a mother-hen, longing to gather the children of Jerusalem like chicks under her wings. Herod the fox has an eye on this particular hen. Yet Jesus knows that it will not be the fox that gets the mother-hen in the end. His destiny is not to stay in Galilee, where Herod rules, but to head for Jerusalem, where the prophet must suffer. And Jerusalem will be the goal of our Lenten journey in a few weeks’ time.

But already, at this early stage in the journey, Jerusalem is uppermost in Jesus’ thoughts. Even today, it is difficult to stand on the Mount of Olives overlooking the city, and not find Jesus’ words springing spontaneously to your lips: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you.’ One is overwhelmed by the fact that so holy a city is as unholy as they come. Over the centuries, it has been built up and razed to the ground by the shedding of blood; again and again, the prophets have pleaded with its people to return to the Lord; it has seen conquest and humiliation – at the hands of Israelites and pagans, Muslims and Christians alike. Jesus himself was moved to tears when he finally arrived in sight of the city.

For Jesus knows, while he is still on the journey, that, although the mother-hen has escaped the clutches of the fox, she will be rejected by her chicks in Jerusalem. If ever there was a city that should have heeded the prophets and recognised the time of the Lord’s coming, it was Jerusalem. If not even the holy city of Jerusalem could see the things that make for peace, then what hope is there for the rest of the world?

And yet, paradoxically, our gospel tells us that rejection of the Messiah in Jerusalem is part of the divine plan: ‘I must be on my way, today, tomorrow and on the third day,’ says Jesus; ‘it is necessary’. Not because a sadistic God has, with some masterstroke of fox-like cunning, duped the people of Jerusalem into rejecting his Son; but because the mission of the Son is the kind of mission that the world cannot understand, and will only provoke hostility, rejection and death.

But lest we are tempted to feel self-satisfied, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we hear this gospel in Lent. Does our own city fare any better than the city of Jerusalem? More importantly, let’s not forget that the chicks who refused the wing of the mother hen were God’s own people. So perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we chickens gathered in this place pass the test any better? After all, the Gospel goes against the grain of all that common sense and human intuition teaches us. The notion that the Christ fulfils his destiny by dying, that the mother-hen protects her chicks by allowing herself to be killed, is hard even for us. And this season of Lent, which teaches us that the following of Jesus means denying ourselves and losing our life, is a difficult one. Wouldn’t we really prefer the tried and tested security of the hen-house to sheltering in the wings of a hen who is about to be slaughtered?

One of the most moving views of Jerusalem today is seen through a window, from the inside of the Church of Dominus Flevit, the church commemorating Jesus weeping over the city. Framed within that panoramic view, you can see the golden Dome of the Rock, the site of the Temple, but also, in the background, the grey dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus died and rose again. But in the centre of the window, the lens as it were through which one sees the whole city, is a chalice. And looking through the chalice containing Christ’s blood, at that tragic, blood-stained city of Jerusalem, and through Jerusalem into the blood-stained world, the vision of peace, however fleetingly, becomes a possibility. Words of scripture come to mind, words speaking about the breaking down of the dividing wall of hostility, of Christ making peace by the blood of his cross; offering the possibility that the mother hen may eventually gather her scattered children under her wings.

Lent III - Canon Robin Ward

I want to talk this morning about a forgotten fault: the sin of Acedia. What is Acedia? The word itself is one of those odd theological words like propitiation and tutiorism which are actually quite useful but which can’t decide whether they are really Latin or really English, and so end up being neither. But it is one of the seven capital or deadly sins, like pride and lust and gluttony, and under its other name of sloth it is perhaps more familiar. Why not call it sloth then, and strike a blow for plain English? The reason is that sloth now means laziness, and Acedia is more particular and more dangerous than that: we call someone slothful who sits down with a can of lager watching the rugby when he knows he ought to be cutting the lawn or doing the shopping; that is certainly lazy, but it isn’t Acedia, which really means spiritual sloth. In the Middle Ages, everyone was taught about Acedia as one of the seven deadly sins, and examined about it at their Easter Confession: we know this because Chaucer has a whole chapter about it in The Parson’s Tale. His definition is very clear and very good:

Envye and ire maken bitternesse in herte, which bitterness is mooder of Accidie… Thanne is Accidie the angwissh of troubled herte; and Seint Augustyn seith ‘it is anoy of goodnesse and Ioye of harm.’ (l.677)

Our medieval forefathers were particularly aware of this sin because of the religious communities which they had among them, as Acedia is the besetting sin of religious people living together in community. John Cassian, who founded the first monastery in western Europe on the island of Lerins in the south of France, wrote a guide for his monks which tells them about the grave danger of Acedia: when overcome by this vice, it makes the monk stay in his cell idle and lazy, without making any spiritual progress, or it drives him out from thence and makes him restless and a wanderer, and indolent in the matter of all kinds of work… People who don’t know religious communities often think that monks and nuns must live very quiet, uneventful lives, free from the sort of passions and upheavals which life in the world brings. This could not be further from the truth! The dedication and high hopes of a religious vocation can easily burn out into frustration and the anguish of a troubled heart. Browning captures this well in his poem, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, where a monk speculates on murdering unsuspecting brother Lawrence because of the annoying ways he has of watering pot plants, setting out his knife and fork and cultivating melons for the abbot’s table. In the end he contents himself with sabotaging the garden: How go on your flowers? None double? Not one fruit-sort you can spy? Strange!-And I, too, at such trouble, Keep them close-nipped on the sly.

So much for monks, and nuns: what about Acedia in the lives of Christians living in the world. There are good reasons for supposing that spiritual sloth is the besetting sin of our time. It isn’t so much militant unbelief or antagonism that has emptied the churches of western Europe, it is indifference: people may well believe in God (they generally do), and nearly everyone seems to think that life continues after death in some way that we would recognise, but there is no sense of urgency or even inquisitiveness about how God might show us His holy will, or how our life here relates to Him and the life of the world to come. And Christians also fall into the same indifference when their commitment and their zeal grow cold, and they suffer the same fate as John Cassian’s monks: either they stay put, and go through their religious duties with coldness and formality, or they become restless and unsettled, convinced that if only this or that in their church life were different, all would be well again.

There are three areas in which the damage done by Acedia is particularly apparent. Firstly, in our life of prayer and our relationship with God, we need to preserve a lively sense of our divine calling, and the pressing reality of our religion. Jesus says No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God (Luke 9:62). If we find the effort of prayer and Bible study too much, if our Sunday worship means little to us or is simply a source of annoyances about things which we really know to be trivial, if we find in our fellow Christians little to inspire us with zeal, then we are in danger of falling victim to Acedia. John Cassian wrote that S. Paul had noticed the beginning of this vice in his converts at Thessalonica, which is why he wrote to them to say: may the Lord make you to increase and abound in love. Acedia is fundamentally a coldness towards love, divine love, and it is Paul’s prayer that his converts, as yet untouched by the more serious and obvious sins which afflicted the Corinthians, might be kept from spiritual sloth by the gift of abounding love; we should share their prayer.

Secondly, there is marriage: not many of us are called to be monks and nuns, but many of us are called to live in fidelity to vows we have made to our spouses, and to sacrifice leisure and convenience for the good of our families and their upbringing. When we marry, as when we make any fundamental choice in life, we exclude other possibilities by our choice, such as staying single or marrying another person. For many people this now seems to be a tyrannous imposition, and as soon as difficulties come along, as they inevitably do, they feel free to indulge the classic symptoms of Acedia: either they stop trying to live their commitment and simply fall back into a sullen formalism, or they assume that somewhere and somehow there will be a new partner who can provide them with what is lacking in their present situation. All this is bolstered by lots of bad psychology about self-fulfilment and human flourishing. The consequences of this mentality are personally and socially disastrous: marriage is a vocation which God sanctifies and blesses, and to indulge in speculation about what might otherwise have been, or what other possibilities might come about in future, is not only foolish and often futile, but also a sinful violation of vocational commitment.

Thirdly, there is our choice of a state of life, our choice of work. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that work has a dignity in God’s purposes: you remember our labour and toil, brethren; we worked night and day, that we might not burden any of you, while we preached to you the gospel of Christ. If we approach our work, especially work which has a strong vocational element, as a burden to be borne with absolutely the minimum of commitment necessary from ourselves, or if we undertake it in a state of constant dissatisfaction, imagining that some other choice would suit us far better, then we risk falling into Acedia, anguish of heart which blights and mars the best of our endeavours. Of course, there will be times when to change work is to change our lives for the better, but we need to know our feelings and our consciences well, if we are to discern between infidelity to our chosen path in life, and the need to adapt that path in the light of changing circumstances.

Acedia, spiritual sloth, is really the enemy of vocation, the enemy of our call from God to take up the life we have received from Him and use it in obedience to his commands to his glory and in the service of others. It kills off our vocation to prayer by making our religion dry and restless; it kills off our vocation to marriage and a fulfilled social life by undermining commitment and our ability to overcome difficulties; it kills off our vocation to work by encouraging unreasonable dissatisfaction, unreal expectations and a dispirited minimalism in our daily tasks. If we are to overcome it, then as S. Paul says, we must abound in love, so that the peculiar bitterness, blended of envy and anger, which provokes it will find no purchase in our hearts. I finish by quoting Cardinal Newman’s fine meditation on vocation, and the holiness of God’s individual call to each one of us:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission- I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He hs not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it- if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore I will trust him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what he is about. He may take away my friends, he may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me- still He knows what he is about.

Lent II - Fr Andrew Davison

Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

The coming of the Son of Man in glory with the holy angels. You might think that these words belong more to Advent than to Lent. I hope to convince you that Lent too is a season oriented towards the end of the world and that which lies beyond it. Lent is an eschatological season.

Lent has an eschatological reference in that, like life as a whole, it is a preparation for the ‘Eternal Eastertide’

One of our great Lent hymns concludes ‘Keep, O keep us, Saviour dear | Ever constant by Thy side; | That with Thee we may appear | At the eternal Eastertide’. Our brief, yearly journey to Easter is an image of the whole of our life. Our lives are a journey to the ‘Eternal Eastertide’. Seen that way, Lent becomes a lesson showing us how to live, not simply for forty days and forty nights, but right through our lives and, indeed, beyond them, as I shall point out in conclusion.

Notice than many of the images and parables that bear upon the period of Lent apply, in the first place, to life as a whole. The Easter Sermon of St John Chrysostom likens Lent to the labourers in the harvest field. Whether we have fasted all of Lent or half of Lent or a quarter of Lent, we share alike in the joy of Easter. But the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, which is where he gets that image, is a parable about the whole of life. Similarly, today’s Gospel is rightly a Lenten Gospel – you must take up your cross and follow me – but here Lent represents life as a whole, for Christ’s injunction to take up our cross is a permanent call.

If Lent is life in miniature, then Lent helps us to understand life. But the reverse is also true – the dynamics and structure of the Christian life as a whole help us to understand Lent. This current season is not simply for the sake of the coming temporal Easter; it is also for the sake of the great and final Easter. Yes, once the celebration of the Resurrection is upon us, we will rightly cast aside fasting and abstinence. Nonetheless, the ascetic benefits that have accrued over Lent should not fade away; the disciplines of heart that have been instilled are not to be cast aside.

Lent is orientated not only to the springtide celebration of Easter, which comes once each year, but to the ‘Eternal Eastertide’. That ‘Eternal Eastertide’ stands for us as a promise, in the same spirit in which the idea of promise so animates our reading from the Letter to the Romans. Lent is a season of hope, when we follow our father Abraham who ‘hoped against hope’, believing God.

Not only do we prepare in Lent for that which lies beyond this life, we also respond to it having come among us already

The disciplines of Lent would be futile if they were not directed to an end that lies in God, to an end which is guaranteed by the promise of God. The end, the goal, is the point. We are not to loose our lives for the sake of loosing them; we are to loose our lives for the sake of saving them. Lent involves real privations, but it is for the sake of a real and redemptive good, which lies with God.

Our Lenten disciplines do, certainly, prepare us for Easter. They ought to have a cleansing quality. But they are not simply a regime of Church-sanctioned detox, of the kind that might appear in an advertisement on Channel Four but with the Archbishop of Canterbury giving the endorsement rather than Carol Vorderman.

Lent, discipline, denial, sacrifice – these are worked out in terms of hope in God. Our hope lies beyond the world. They do not have a merely temporal, merely this-wordly reference. This would be to set our mind on human things and not on divine things.

Lent, I have said looks forward to that which lies beyond. In this it is like Advent. But like Advent it also a season of encounter – for God has pre-empted our longing. Consequently, our relation in Lent to that which lies ahead is not simply one of anticipation or preparation. We do not only prepare in Lent for the cataclysmic action of God, we are also responding to it. An apocalyptic confrontation with God is coming, but has also come and is coming still. In Lent we are responding to the arrival in time of that which lies beyond time. Each of our readings makes this clear: the Lord appeared to Abram, Jesus stood in the midst of the disciples, grace arrived when there was only law and only the expectation of law.

Grace is gratuitous; it is of the nature of grace to arrive out of time; it is not according to the order of things. It is the encounter with God, ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’: life when there was no expectation of anything but death, creation when there was not even anything to expect to be created.

Our faith – which is expressed in works, for us no less than for Abraham – only makes sense in terms of our encounter with the God of grace. Faith is in God who irrupts upon the world: ‘who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist’.

I have said that Lent is an image of life and that the dynamics of the Christian life as a whole – which is one of grace – applies therefore to Lent as well.

Lent is eschatological in that it prefigures purgatory

Let me say in conclusion, that Lent is a symbol and a road map not only for this life but also for what lies beyond it. Lent is symbol of purgatory. In this way too, Lent is an end of the world-ish sort of season. Lent reminds us that purgatory begins now. And if the purgatorial process is bearable now, then perhaps Lent steels us with courage for our journey beyond this life, into the region that C S Lewis described as Lenten lands. We can also embrace, in hope, that portion of our journey into holiness which lies beyond this life.

As I say, the link between Lent and purgatory is not mine. I came across in C S Lewis – who made his confession in this church. On the death of his friend Charles Williams, another of the Inklings, he wrote a poem on this theme. He later adapted for his wife’s epitaph. Referring to her mortal remains, he wrote:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

And to that Easter Day may Almighty God conduct us all also, through our own Lenten lands: for his grace gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

Lent I - Mrs Lucy Gardner

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul, O my God in you I trust; [. . .] Make me to know your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths, Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation, for you I wait all the day long.

Call me odd, but today I find myself breathing a sigh of relief: Lent is finally upon us!

The “Sundays before Lent” have marched us by, Palm Crosses have been burnt; congregations have been ashed; anticipatory tensions have dissolved. We pass now beyond that “ordinary” time which hovers between Epiphany and this most Holy Season of Fasting, into a strangely familiar and yet always extraordinary time of prayer and self-examination.

Now, at last, longed-for peace, quiet stillness and stark austerity are granted their own time and space; the stripping away of adornment and ornament lays bare the starkly simple, undoubtedly beautiful, yet also demanding contours of the ways in which God is moving things from the way they are to the way they should be.

This wilderness respite has arrived unexpectedly welcome for me this year, no doubt underscored by the marked lengthening of days, an increase in temperature, and the first signs of spring emerging from a wintry world.

But herein I am troubled by a worrying thought – might not my relief betray some misguided comfort, some self-indulgence even, in enjoying pious works for their own sake, thus confounding their deepest purpose and intentions?

The danger is always present, that even and precisely in our attempts to repent and believe the gospel, as the Christ who was baptised in the Jordan exhorts us to do; even and precisely as we try to repent and believe, we might exacerbate our sin by drowning out God’s words and actions with our own, making a strange sort of pride out of a false humility.

Or, conversely, there is the coterminous danger that even and precisely in our attempts to offer ourselves for conversion, we might exacerbate our sin by holding something back from God’s eyes, from God’s love, and from God’s redeeming work, out of a kind of shame, which is just another false humility and strange sort of pride.

The season of Lent calls us to full and true humility; it should re-awaken and re-double in us our sense of repentance and our desire for conversion. It calls us to a series of practices crafted in and by the Church as a means of teaching and reminding us that faith is a gift, that the work of redemption in our lives is God’s work, that the work of conversion in our lives is God’s work, that the work of purification in our lives is God’s work, and that the work of sanctification in our lives is God’s work.

Lent is not about replacing the busy-ness of everyday life with a kind of religious busy-ness and self-importance; it is about replacing our busy-ness with God’s busy-ness; it is about replacing self-importance with due recognition of God’s glory: it is about learning to allow God to get on with God’s work in our lives.

These practices of self-denial and of heightened attention to God are also crafted to remind us that this, God’s work of transforming our lives, is an on-going work throughout our earthly lives and perhaps beyond them. And so we are not called so much to be patient with God’s busy-ness, as to be patient with God’s eternal patience.

The annual return of Lent, and its echoes in Friday devotions throughout the year, remind us that God is never finished with us, just as our lives are not finished until we draw our last breath. But just as we must pay attention to the dynamics of the interaction of God’s action, attention and patience with our own patience, attention and action (or perhaps lack of them) in the processes of conversion, so, too, as we pay attention to God, to God’s will and to God’s work, we must in fact also pay attention to ourselves.

But herein lies another danger. The ascetic disciplines of the Church have often been vainly misunderstood. Too easily, Christian contemplation has been confused with other forms of meditation and human attempts at transcendence. In these the spirit is seen as struggling to be free of a body which weighs it down and threatens to drown it in floods of sin and materiality. Too often, if you like, the body has been made a scapegoat for sins of the spirit.

But this misunderstanding is wildly wide of the mark: for whilst perhaps it is true that a spirit cannot sin apart from its connection to its body, it is more so true that a body cannot sin apart from its connection to its spirit. Just so, in this life at least, a soul cannot sin apart from its connection to its body and spirit.

Too often, our contradictory desires, our ability to long for God at the same time as hankering after evil, our internal, spiritual tensions, the divisions between our true, God-made selves and the selves we conjure for ourselves, too often these differences have been mistakenly identified as tensions between body and spirit and soul, rather than as divisions which run right across and through all of them.

But God does not seek to rescue our spirits from our bodies, nor our souls from our bodies and our spirits; God does not seek to rescue some supposed good parts of us, whatever they may be, from our supposedly less noble parts.

God seeks nothing less than our full conversion – a fullness which is a complete change of direction, from following sin to facing God, but a fullness which is also about the turning of the whole person. It is my soul, which encompasses my body and my spirit, just as it holds them together, which God wishes to convert and transform. All of me is what God asks of me.

Those parts of my life, those parts of my thoughts, those parts of my soul, which are not fit to enter into God’s presence, cannot simply be left behind by me, nor can I hide them from God - for all that I might try to hide them from myself. I am to be transformed by God by allowing God’s gaze to rest on all of me, which means I, too, strengthened by grace, must see and offer all of me to God. It will be for God to decide what shall be burned away and what shall be covered up; if I keep something back, if I hold something in reserve, whether through shame or pride, then that sin, that lack of offering all to God, will hold all of me back.

Christian contemplation, then, is a turning to God, a listening and attending to God, a searching for God, a waiting for God, a hearing of God’s judgement, as pronounced in the Coming, the Dying and the Raising of the Word Incarnate; it is always a building up of our knowledge and our love of God, just as it is always also a stripping away, an “unknowing”, of what we thought we knew of God.

But since it is a turning of the whole person to God, since it is listening to God’s judgement, it is also always a learning to see the world and ourselves as we truly are, as God sees things. And precisely as a turning of the whole person to God, it is also always a making of the whole person available to God for the continuation of God’s work in the world.

Christian prayer is not just about moments of physical rest and spiritual reflection, poised resourcefully between moments of action. Christian prayer is about a physical-cum-spiritual training in obedience; it is about learning to do with the whole person - body, spirit and soul - just this: what God wants.

How fortunate for us that God has not merely told or shown us what this is! In the life of Christ, God has already lived a life of obedience for us; and in the life of the Church, God has provided the means for us to become part of the Christ who was baptised for us in Jordan’s river who offered himself, body and spirit, for us on the cross and who offers us union with him, body and spirit, in baptism and in sharing the meal in which he offers us that same self, body and spirit, again and again and again.

In this Holy Season of Lent, in this wilderness respite, as we tread both well-worn and novel paths of the Church’s discipline, let us learn with the Psalmist (whose words have become the Morning Prayer responsory for Lent) to offer our souls, our spirits and our bodies to God; let us learn to allow our whole selves to be brought fully into God’s saving presence:

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul, O my God in you I trust; [. . .] Make me to know your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths, Lead me in your truth, and teach me for you are the God of my salvation, for you I wait all the day long.

Let us pray that we may learn more fully what it is God wants us to be and do, and let us concentrate on allowing God’s grace to train our whole selves - our minds, our wills, our hearts, AND our hands, our feet, our voices, in short, our souls - to be obedient to that will and to show it forth in the world.

Ash Wednesday - Ian Boxall

“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. … But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret ...” (Mt 6:16-18).

So says the Lord in today’s Gospel. Yet in a few moments time, we shall be queuing up to disfigure our faces. We shall probably look solemn, if not exactly dismal, as we are reminded of our origin in the dust. And we shall be discouraged from washing our faces afterwards – still less anointing our heads with oil – so as to hide what we are doing from other people. Nor have we come to a secret place in order to do this, but to a very public place, in the company of other people. Indeed, in my experience of previous Ash Wednesday evenings, many people will head out from this Mass onto the Cowley Road, so that Tesco will be full of shoppers walking round very publicly with smudges of grey ash on their foreheads.

In short, what we are doing this evening seems to be in blatant disregard for Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel.

But let’s look carefully at those words of Jesus. They are part of a much larger warning to the disciples about the dangers inherent in three religious practices, all of which are integral to the Christian keeping of Lent: almsgiving, prayer and fasting. The basic question posed by Matthew is not whether Christians should fast, or pray, or give alms. Rather it is this: what distinguishes the followers of Jesus from the followers of the Pharisees on the one hand, and the religious observances of the Gentiles on the other? How are we to distinguish authentic prayer, authentic alms-giving, or authentic fasting from their misdirected alternatives?

So let’s return to fasting, and the contrast which Jesus sets up. On the one side are the ‘hypocrites’, who look dismal, and disfigure their faces. The warning is made all the more vivid by the exaggerated terms in which it is presented. The hypocrites are frankly made to look ridiculous. They strut around in a pompous manner, blowing loud trumpets, and blocking the traffic on street corners. When it comes to fasting, they pour ashes on their heads as if they were lamenting a national disaster rather than engaged in a modest act of personal piety. Moreover, the very word ‘hypocrite’, hupokritēs, suggests that they are little more than actors, wearing masks to obscure their true identity. Indeed, we might plausibly translate Matthew’s words, not as ‘they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting’, but ‘they disfigure their faces so as to appear to others that they are fasting’. They are only playing at it, and the warning to hearers of Matthew’s Gospel is that we can just as easily succumb to the same pretence.

On the other side are those who listen attentively to the words of Jesus, who put oil on their head as a sign of joy, and wash their heads, and perform their fasting ‘in secret’, in hiddenness, in their inmost selves, where their heavenly Father sees. What the hypocrites with their ridiculous masks have failed to see is that the practice of fasting is about replacing pretence with reality. It means going into the secret, hidden place which our heavenly Father sees. It involves stripping away those things, even good things, with which we normally surround ourselves and which we convince ourselves that we can’t live without. It means confronting those desires which can threaten to enslave us, rather than pretending that they don’t really exist or can’t do us harm. And as that stripping away happens and the battle-lines are drawn, fasting heightens our awareness of our utter dependence on God.

But if authentic fasting makes us aware of our total dependence upon God, then it also opens us outwards to our fellow human beings. Fasting is not a performance to be seen by others, but an act of mercy which reaches out to others. As St Peter Chrysologus puts it:

Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others, you open God’s ear to yourself (Sermo 43: cited in 2009 Lenten Message of Benedict XVI).

In other words, when we fast we are acknowledging the integral connection between the inside and the outside, between the internal discipline of fasting and its outward expression in sacrificial living. It is precisely this relationship between the inside and the outside which the prophet Isaiah speaks about: “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high … Is not this the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs to the yoke … Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house?” (Isa. 58:3b-7).

So what we have come to do today is not to disfigure our faces like the hypocrites, so as to be seen by others. Rather, the purpose of that ash on our foreheads is to act as a warning precisely against this kind of hypocrisy. It reminds us of our human fragility, our utter dependence upon God without whom we are but dust. It reminds us of the integral connection between the inside and the outside, an external sign of an inner disposition. And it is crucial that this mark we receive is the mark of the cross: as a vivid reminder that our prayer and fasting and almsgiving are to point others, not to ourselves, but to Christ.