Fr Martyn’s Mutterings: The Community of the Church and the Forty Days of Lent

Well, Lent begins this Ash Wednesday and, yet again, it brings with it an opportunity to renew our identity with Jesus our Lord. These forty days of preparation for Easter gives us chance to break with the world around us that can draw us away from him. This is not something we have no idea about because at every Eucharist we try to take this path – we renounce our unfaithfulness and desire to begin afresh to be his disciples and his friends. Lent offers us a programme to follow of fasting, almsgiving and prayer. To embrace the discipline of reading the Scriptures and praying with them – to switch off the TV and give some time for our quiet union and belonging to him (you do this by using the weekly inserts as a resource). This is not onerous, but unless we embrace some practice of regular prayer and some form of discipline, our faith will not grow and mature. We are to be a work in progress – becoming the image and likeness of Christ.

So the purpose of Lent is to keep alive one basic fact – being a Christian means we are always becoming a Christian anew. Our faith is never static and still but dynamic and living – a constant process. We each need a faith that addresses our daily condition and the world we live in. For this reason, the Lent studies are about living our faith in the world and how address the complex of choices set before us.

It is obvious we have a natural biological life within the world – yet to be a Christian means we do not just follow the prevailing attitudes of the times we live in. Moreover, we are called to more than a natural life - but rather to a supernatural life with Christ living by the values of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Let me put this in another way. If we work within the grace and compassion of Christ and strive to respond to him by prayer and developing a Christian spirituality and moral life, we gain an insight, an understanding of Christ and the purpose of our being. This counters some of the various false values that we see day by day because now we see and measure them against the vision of the whole – who is Christ.