Temple Cloud

In view of my emotional instability combined with my ambivalent feelings about Jesus, Lent is a difficult time for me.  Trying to get into a pattern of reading a Bible passage each day and thinking about it just gives me more things to worry about. I had been mostly on a fairly even keel for the past three weeks.   But on Sunday evening, I was unexpectedly knocked back by a wave of self-pity. PDB11 and I are currently reading The Rainbow of Renewal by Michael Mitton.   This is divided into seven weeks’ worth of themed chapters, with the first week on the theme of mourning. We discussed our experiences of loss.   PDB11 talked about his best friend who had died when they were in their early twenties, and his experience of splitting up with his previous girlfriend.   While of course he still misses his old friend, splitting up with his girlfriend had been difficult to get over because, rather than her having died and therefore being definitely out of reach,...

We’re now one week into Lent.  Admittedly, I did take a day off yesterday to eat a slice of cake and a few Nachos, as it was a friend’s birthday – but then, as I see it, the point of Lent being forty days of self-restraint over a forty-six day period is that it allows for the occasional day off.  I used to think that Lent was called that because, before globalisation and frozen or tinned foods, it was a lean time .   It was the end of winter, most of the supplies stored in autumn were used up, and there weren’t many fresh vegetables growing, cows giving milk, or hens laying.   Making it an official fast in remembrance of Jesus’s ordeal in the wilderness was both a way of deterring people from eating up the last of the remaining supplies too quickly (or the wealthy and greedy gorging themselves on supplies that everyone else needed), and a reminder that God knows how it feels to experience hunger and hardship. More recently, though, I learned that the word ‘Lent’ ...

Has Christianity lost its way?  It seems to me, from the memes and articles I see on the internet satirising Christianity, that something has gone badly wrong in the way that evangelists try to teach the gospel message. Of course, there are plenty of reasons why many people are not Christians.   One of the biggest is that God’s existence cannot be scientifically proved.   After all, if God exists, then He is everywhere, so He is not an object in the universe that anyone can point to.   We can test the effectiveness of a vaccine or a drug by measuring the health of a group of people who have been given it compared to a control group who haven’t.   But we can’t test the effectiveness of prayer – or the validity of different religions – by comparing the recovery of one group of patients who have been prayed for by a vicar, one group who have been prayed for by an imam, and a third group who have not been prayed for, because God is perfectly capable of choosing to...

I had hoped to spend the final week before Ash Wednesday doing a sort of digital Shrove Tuesday, prior to a fanfiction fast.  Giving up eggs, meat and milk for Lent isn’t really too much of a hardship for me these days.   After all, there are plenty of meals I like that don’t involve them.   Giving up eating sweet things like biscuits and chocolate at work – or the cheesy tortilla bake that we usually share at Dungeons & Dragons – would be tougher, but I can manage – I think.   And we would need to allow ourselves the odd day off anyway, with Mothering Sunday and PDB11’s birthday in Lent.   (This year, my birthday falls on Good Friday, so I think I’ll postpone celebrating it until Easter Monday.) But if I was really going to take on a difficult task, then spending less time on fanfiction – both reading and writing it – and finding time for meditating, reading serious books, and writing blog posts about what (if anything) I had learned, would be far more...