Shrove Tuesday

Today is Shrove Tuesday, which means that tomorrow is the beginning of Lent.  Shrove Tuesday is easy to deal with – it’s an opportunity to have one last unhealthy, self-indulgent meal (pasta carbonara, quite possibly followed by ice-cream and/or any chocolate biscuits left over from St Valentine’s Day) before sticking to plain food during Lent.  As I quite like abstemious, vegetarian meals anyway, in practice this means that in return for my agreeing to the Beloved Partner’s (henceforth known as PDB11's) request for pasta carbonara this week, he agrees to my cooking bean and fennel casserole next week.

Lent, though, is a different matter.  It’s not just about giving up chocolate or your favourite time-wasting internet site until Easter.  For Christians, Lent is supposed to be about drawing closer to God, which would often involve spending more time praying, meditating and reading the Bible. 

At the start of last Lent, I resolved to attend three midweek prayer meetings every week, in the three village churches that make up our parish.  I felt disappointed that there wasn’t a discussion group.  Admittedly, I was probably part of the reason there wasn’t, as I got into angry arguments whenever the so-called ‘discussion’ group didn’t have time in its schedule to listen to my questions.  I did the same in prayer meetings, if I wasn’t clear about what we were praying for when we prayed, ‘May Thy kingdom come’, and whether it was something I actually wanted.

At any rate, lockdown put an end to the prayer meetings, and soon to Sunday services too.  A year on, we are still in lockdown, so any praying and worshipping I do, or any discussing religious issues, will need to be either on my own or with PDB11, or with friends over the phone.  This isn’t a problem, especially as PDB11 is someone I actually can have free-ranging discussions with – provided I remain sane enough to have any kind of rational discussion. 

My problem is that when discussing anything to do with God, I tend to jettison sanity at the outset.  I retreat to my default mode of paranoia, assuming that God is a sadist who just wants me to suffer as much as possible.  Christmas and Easter are often tense times for me, as I can never be sure whether I will feel full of joy and peace and assured of God’s love, or convinced that the whole thing is some hideous hoax and that God is just taunting us with the apparent promise of redemption.

This came to its nadir in 2015, when I decided to spend parts of the Easter weekend actually fasting (as in not eating at all) rather than just abstaining from chocolate.  Some people find fasting a great aid to spirituality, as it helps them learn self-control.  In my case, especially as I was in a fairly physically active job then, being hungry just triggered an imbalance in my blood sugar that pushed me over the edge from merely neurotic to outright paranoid nutter. 

I became convinced that God regards all humans as totally evil, therefore has no interest in redeeming us (since there would be nothing non-evil in us to redeem) and sent Jesus to tell us to hate ourselves and each other so that we would all commit suicide.  I went to church on Easter morning, shouted, ‘There is no peace!  Jesus did not come to bring peace, but a sword!’ and ran home crying and kicking myself (literally).

Mercifully, no longer trusting God’s love meant that I decided to look for human love, and in May 2015 I joined a dating website and soon met PDB11.  Since I loved him and didn’t want to make his life as miserable as I had made my own, I decided to stop self-harming and start looking for therapy, and my life since then has been a patchy journey towards recovery.  The general curve has been upwards, at least until the past year, when the frustrations of lockdown began to wear down both PDB11 and me.

So, this Lent as every Lent, I want to develop spiritually.  However, I want to try to do so without putting my sanity at risk, and (just as importantly) without causing too much stress to PDB11 if he fears that I’m on the edge of a breakdown again.

This will probably take some trial and error to find out what I can cope with at the moment.  Spending time with PDB11 praying together helps.  As we pray for our friends and family, for ourselves and each other, for oppressed people around the world, for anyone affected by coronavirus or developing or distributing vaccines, and for the people of the world to find solutions to poverty and climate change, it helps me to believe that God is someone who cares about human problems – and who wants us to be active in solving them.

I’m trying to meditate, which is sometimes relaxing, sometimes boring, and occasionally traumatic.  Until having a bad experience a few weeks ago, I hadn’t really believed it was possible to have an allergic reaction to meditation, but this is a subject for another post.

At the moment, I’m not reading the Bible much.  If you find it helpful, brilliant.  But my experience is that we tend to read our own preconceptions into the Bible, and so, if I read it without being grounded in a strong sense of God’s love, it just reinforces my sense of rejection.  So, if I understand hope and redemption better when reading Star Wars fanfiction than when reading the Bible, God would probably rather I read Star Wars fanfiction, or Cornelia Funke or Lois McMaster Bujold.

One thing that does help is playing hymns.  This gives me a way to explore the themes of the liturgical texts for Lent, filtered through the experiences of hymn-writers.  However, since nobody claims that the words of Charles Wesley or Joachim Neander, or even Thomas Aquinas or Thomas à Kempis, are inerrant inspired scripture, I feel free to think about whether I agree with them, and what insights I can find.  And this is the subject of tomorrow’s post.