Good for the soul

LENT: the season of self-examination and repentance.

Observation of the seasons of the Christian year is not much indulged in by Protestants, though things are changing.

The Christian calendar, built around the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost, provides a rhythm of reflection, a discipline of devotion. Times of fasting are followed by times of feasting.

Protestantism generally tends to prefer a more even emotional and spiritual keel. It’s not really so long ago that everyone in Presbyterian Scotland worked on Christmas Day, and watchnight services were regarded as idolatrous.

As one who loves both the democratic radicalism of the high Scottish Presbyterian vision and the glory of the Roman Catholic mystical and liturgical life, I realise that I am a postmodern Protestant Catholic. In other words, a freak.

Lent I like. Traditionally, the season of forty days preceding Easter is observed by self-denial, giving to the poor, religious reflection, and penitential acts. It is a solemn time. The length of the season is a conscious echo of the period Jesus spent in the wilderness wrestling with his own vocation. It is a time for examining the roots of one’s own life.

It is good for the soul. Holding up a mirror to your life and asking some fundamental questions is health-giving.

If it simply becomes an occasion for self-flagellation, for beating yourself up, it is not much good; but a structured time of reflection about priorities and values, of asking the foundational questions: “Who am I, and what is my life about?” can be life-enhancing.

“The thing is to understand myself”, wrote Soren Kierkegaard, “to see what God really wishes me to do. The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” Victor Frankl, the great Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, wrote of his extreme experiences in the concentration camps, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” These are Lenten statements.

What about giving things up for Lent? A friend of mine, the late Helen Steven, used to give up alcohol for Lent, every year. She did it to check that booze hadn’t moved from being a gifted delight to becoming a creeping addiction that can rot both body and soul.

Workaholism has often been applauded in church life, despite the fact that it seriously distorts the Gospel itself.

Here is another modern addiction that can inflict serious damage – the felt need to check one’s mobile phone every minute or two – even round the dinner table.

“The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”

One of the fastest-growing features of life in the modern age is the rise of bereavement counselling for people who have lost their mobile phones.

Addiction to the brilliant new technologies is becoming endemic in our times. Theologically speaking, any addiction that displaces God in the inner habitation of the soul needs to be rooted out as a matter of priority.

Lenten activities need not be restricted to the inner life.

On the first day of Lent a few years ago, Protestants and Roman Catholics queued up in Parliament Square, Edinburgh, to have their foreheads daubed with ashes from the symbolic burning of a model of a Trident submarine.

Lent still has the power to turn lives around.

This article appears in the February 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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