Lent in Retrospect

Happy Easter!  Okay, Easter Sunday is nearly over as I write this, but the season of Eastertide goes on for seven weeks, until Whitsun /Pentecost, which this year is on 28^th May.

To my surprise, this year I have not only had a happy Easter, but even a happy Lent.  Considering my ambivalent relationship with Christianity, a season in which I spend more time thinking about God, praying and meditating is likely to be emotionally turbulent.  Still, this year, there have been maybe half a dozen bad days over the past seven weeks, compared with three times as many in Lent 2022 or 2021.  And at least these have been one-off days, instead of going around feeling miserable and paranoid for most of a week at a time.

I don’t know what made the difference.  Maybe, at the age of forty-two, I am finally managing to grow up, at least slightly.  Maybe the results of years of therapy are finally showing.  Maybe keeping a journal of things I am thankful for helps.  Maybe eating fermented foods like raw miso, sauerkraut, and live yogurt (yes, while trying to be vegan – it turns out there are some breeds of yogurt bacteria who don’t mind feeding on soya or coconut) is breeding a more harmonious ecosystem in my innards and this is helping my mood.  Whatever it is, I am thankful for it.

One thing I haven’t done well lately, however, is blogging.  I meant to post weekly essays discussing what people generally aim to do during Lent, and how well or badly I was doing at it.  But somehow, I haven’t got round to doing much writing, so, instead, this is a review of the past six and a half weeks.

As the Wikipedia article on Lent describes,

 

Three traditional practices to be taken up with renewed vigour during Lent; these are known as the three pillars of Lent:

1.            prayer (justice toward God)

2.            fasting (justice toward self)

3.            almsgiving (justice toward neighbours)

 

In some liturgies, a prayer for Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) phrases it slightly differently:

 

Through fasting, prayer and acts of service you bring us back to your generous heart.

 

Of these three, the ‘fast’ of going mostly vegan was by far the easiest.  The most awkward part was that, now that our village tradition of community Lent lunches of home-made soup, bread and cheese, tea and home-made cake, has been revived after three years of abeyance, I felt like a priggish troublemaker asking which of the soups were dairy free.  I could live with having plain bread without butter or cheese, bringing a bottle of soya milk to put in my tea, and passing by the cakes, but when I’m not actually a regular vegan, it felt mean to turn my nose up at someone’s lovely mushroom soup just because it contained cream.

Still, I’ve been healthy, happy and full of energy over the past six and a half weeks, and am happy to continue mostly eating plant-based foods.  It was nice to be able to celebrate Easter today with buttered toast for breakfast, a cup of tea with real milk and a piece of chocolate cake at church after the service, and lamb casserole for lunch, but I don’t actually need meat and dairy every day.  This has been the easiest Lent challenge I’ve ever done.

Worship and godliness in various forms – Bible study, reading Christian books, praying, meditating, and playing hymns – has also gone much better than usual.  Shortly before Lent, I bought a number of Christian books from Shepton Community Bookshop, a lovely second-hand bookshop whose manager is a friend of mine.  Of its wide range of religious books, I chose The Journey by John Pritchard as a Lent study guide which PDB11 and I could study together.  While I was at it, I picked up How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? by Lewis Smedes and The Divine Dance by Richard Rohr.

All of these were well worth reading.  How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong? gave me hope and reassurance, and The Divine Dance stretched my understanding of what it means to be God and what it means to be human in wonderful ways.  More impressively, though, The Journey encouraged me actually to persist in reading the Bible – specifically, the Gospel of Luke – and thinking about and discussing it, nearly every day throughout Lent, without giving in to paranoia and conspiracy theories that Jesus secretly hates us.  Even when I did revert into ‘Jesus thinks we’re all evil and wants us to go to hell’ mode, I managed to come out of it, accept that this interpretation wasn’t consistent with what we see of Jesus in the gospels, and go back to Bible study without spending several days sulking.

I didn’t do a huge amount of actual praying, at least in the sense of talking to God, over Lent.  Numerous charities had sent us leaflets about their work and people who were in need, any of which would have been a basis for praying daily to God to help the people whose lives or livelihoods were threatened by war, persecution, poverty or climate change.  But there were so many that the prayers could feel like an empty recitation of names (mostly only pseudonyms where people’s real identities had to be kept hidden) when God already knows these people and their problems and I don’t know them at all.

However, what I did find helpful in focusing my mind on God (other than writing a daily prayer of thanks in my journal) was to practise playing hymns.  The hymn book we use in our church has a list of suggested hymns for every week of Lent and every day of Holy Week, so it was easy to be encouraged to expand my range and not just stick to old favourites that I already knew.  Singing or playing hymns is a way of using other people’s words as a starting point for prayer and thinking, ‘Which of these bits do I believe?  Which bits do I need to change?  Which bits are insights that I have overlooked and need reminding of?’

But what is the third pillar?  Almsgiving, or acts of service?  Is there a difference?  To me there is, because giving my time to do something practical is a gift that I personally can give.

As a household, I think PDB11  and I give a reasonable amount to charity, both in regular donations and in response to emergency appeals, such as when numerous disaster relief charities emailed us asking for funds to respond to the earthquake in Syria and Turkey this February.  But because the money comes out of our joint account, and neither of us could reasonably make a large donation to a charity without discussing it with the other, it doesn’t feel as if I personally am contributing anything.

Doing voluntary work is something that anyone with spare time can do, surely?  My first job was working part-time in a SCOPE shop when I was thirteen.

Nevertheless, in the past few years, I have found that while my mental and emotional stability is shaky, getting and keeping jobs in voluntary organisations can be nearly as difficult as getting and keeping paid jobs.  A few years ago, I applied unsuccessfully to work for Circles UK, a rehabilitation service for people convicted of sexual offences; for Coram Beanstalk, a charity that helps children learn to read; and for a local day centre for elderly people with dementia.  Each of these turned me down for one reason or another which largely boiled down to my not being emotionally ready for the work.

In the past few years, I haven’t even done well at the much less challenging task of working in shops raising money for charities.  Either I got into an argument with my boss because I wanted to do things my way (for example, taking all the light romances out of the revolving stand and laying them out on the shop floor in order to sort them alphabetically by author), or I got over-emotional about something and frightened a customer.  Either I got so annoyed and frustrated that I left, or I was asked not to come back.

This year, I decided I was ready to try once more.  After over a year of fundraising, Ashwick & Oakhill Village Hall had finally managed to open a community café, the Oakleaf Café.  This had its grand opening in December 2022 before opening regularly from this January.

I spent the Christmas Fair opening session collecting up cups.  Over January, I began getting used to the regular routine of working in the café.  And then, before many weeks had passed, I got into an argument with the organisers. 

Partly the problem was that they were trying to be tactful by suggesting that I ‘might like to’ come in a bit later and just concentrate on clearing tables and washing cups instead of arriving before it started to get busy and trying to fit in some barrista training.  If they had said outright, ‘You’re not allowed to come in any earlier than 10.30,’  I could have accepted it, but as it was, when they kept saying, ‘We just thought you might prefer it that way,’ but wouldn’t listen when I said, ‘Yes, but actually I’d prefer to have time to learn to work the coffee machine,’ I felt frustrated that people weren’t being straight with me.

One day, I got into such an angry row that I was asked not to come in at all for a couple of weeks.  At the time, I wondered whether I even wanted to come back.  But in my time of suspension, I had time to think it over and realise several things.

Firstly, I hadn’t even bothered to complete the online training module on food safety that I had been emailed.  Under the circumstances, it was entirely reasonable that the other staff should conclude that I wasn’t very serious about working in food preparation, and was probably better off in a simple role like washing up.

Secondly, I didn’t actually mind being a washer-up.  If I had applied to work in a commercial café rather than a volunteer-led one, I wouldn’t have complained about doing whatever job I was assigned.  And I had volunteered to work at the Oakleaf Café because I wanted my village to have somewhere to go for a drink that wasn’t a pub (nice as the Oakhill Inn also is), not because it was my ambition to become proficient in making cappuccinos and bacon baps.

Thirdly, if I didn’t learn to control my temper, I couldn’t hold down a job anywhere.  I came back, and have continued to work there without problems.

It helped that in the meantime, I had also found another voluntary job, this one at the Sue Ryder charity shop in Shepton Mallet.  Here, my role is a lot more flexible – I and all the other volunteers may spend much of a shift sorting through, labelling and hanging second-hand clothes, but there is usually a chance to do something else, like replenishing the books section, at some point.  I get on well with the managers and the other volunteers, and usually at least someone there gets my jokes.

Again, as with the café, there are times when I get frustrated and get into arguments.  But I’m learning to keep calm and understand when something isn’t really a big deal, or when the person I am arguing with has a fair point.

So I now have commitments that keep me usefully occupied outside the home for an average of twelve hours per week, plus around eight hours of walking to and from my workplaces to keep me fit.  All in all, I’m starting to feel more like a functioning human being again.  Life is looking up.