February 2010 You Wanted To Know

Q: Is Lent relevant anymore?

A: I'm writing this at the end of December, when various articles have appeared about why people celebrate Christmas and Easter when our society has seemingly declared religion (and particularly Christianity) irrelevant. Many people who have abandoned any regular church observance are nonetheless attracted to stories, music and ritual, which point them to "that something Other beyond the here-and-now," and bind them together in a sense of community they have otherwise lost. People have also written that we don't need God to be moral, which is undoubtedly true — but then again a recent social science experiment in Quebec suggested that people who took a strong stance on the environment were more likely to cheat than those who did not. The researchers argued that our ability to feel morally superior in one area can allow us to be immoral in others. Furthermore, Hans-Georg Moeller (a philosophy professor at Brock University) has written a controversial new book ("The Moral Fool. A Comparative Case for Amorality"), in which he argues that moral certainties and rigidities sometimes get in the way of our finding solutions to many problems. So what has this to do with Lent? Well, it seems many people have been turned off religion by fundamentalism on the one hand, and moral self-righteousness on the other. Those of us who observe Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent will be reminded that, in Matthew's gospel, Jesus tells us, when we fast, not to make a show of it, but to be outwardly joyful. Here, as in many other places, Jesus shows how an outward concern for God and neighbour can easily become self-serving, self-justifying and inherently immoral. His focus is less on what we do, than why we do it. In T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral," Becket's soliloquy on the eve of his death includes these famous words— "The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason."

Lent's forty days invite us to recall the forty days of the flood and Noah's ark, the forty years of Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, the forty days of Jesus' temptation in the desert, and the forty weeks of Jesus' gestation in Mary’s womb — all symbolic times of cleansing and anticipation. The church year reminds us of our need to balance feasting with fasting, both as physical cleansing and an opportunity to counter our addictions (yes, all of us have them!), as well as an opportunity to examine our own deepest motives for our behaviour. Without this balance we become complacent and hidebound. Without fasting and penitence we lose our capacity to feast and celebrate. Without acknowledging the reality of our temptations we lose our ability to make real choices, and therefore our freedom. All this applies to us both as individuals and as communities and institutions.

So this Lent, as we recall both Israel’s and Jesus’ temptations, we might ask ourselves how we think and act in self-centred ways, and with closed hearts and minds &mdah; aided and abetted by the assumption that our often superficial beliefs and moral certainties are used, not to the glory of God and the well-being of our neighbours, but as an excuse not to grow or to show compassion for others. These forty days can be an occasion for us to deepen our faith and become more responsive to God’s call to us, both as individuals and as communities of faith. May our self-emptying enable a new fulfilling, and our practice of compassion lead to true resurrection. A creative Lent and a joyful Easter to all!