We are halfway through Lent with Lent 4, 5 and Palm Sunday to go before getting to Holy Week.
So what are you doing for Lent and how it is going? What should you be doing? Lent is a journey – part of it is looking inside, removing things and taking on new things – building up. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby suggested the following – “At the individual level it draws us to see what we have been saved from, and what we are being saved for.”
“A good Lent makes space for hope by leading us afresh into encounter with the holiness of God.” A good Lent starts with us.
“A good Lent begins with paying attention, with beginning to make straight the way of the Lord by listening… We cannot listen while we fill our ears with our own self-confidence and our own self-worth.
“So, how do we listen? Read Luke’s gospel, taking a small chunk each day, and ask yourself as you read it three simple questions: What does it say? What does it mean? What am I going to do about it? Very simple.
“And what do I do about it? Ask yourself: “How do I make my life more open to Christ because of what this is saying to me?”
“For myself, such reading is part of my own daily discipline of prayer, which includes a lot of other things as well. Time is spent and at the end of jotting down whatever banal or very occasionally less banal thoughts I have, I always put in a couple of lines of what I can do about it.
“Sometimes it is very practical writing to someone or speaking to someone who I may have offended. It may be very simple, merely saying a prayer of sorry, or thank you, or petition for something of which I need reminding.
“A good Lent must overflow in generosity. How do we live a good Lent with those whom we live with? The bumps in the road we need to smooth out for the Lord to come? Relationships that have been neglected and therefore are full of clutter that needs removing?
“They can be very difficult: broken relationships may be easily mendable, little irritations – or it may be that we need, in a good Lent, to take the first step to clearing away a major landslide.
“How do you do it in practice? Openness, transparency, and also go back and use the same approach to scripture as I suggested a few moments ago. One has to treat each person and situation different
“Let me suggest one other. As individuals, even short periods of complete silence during Lent, fasting from noise and conversation and distraction, will be of great value. How little we do of it.
“I’ve had to learn, and I’m still very much learning, that I do not need to do anything in that time. I need only to be willing to listen. It is a time of meditation and reflection, of discovering the God who – all the time – is saying: “Here I am.”
“The discipline of a good Lent is to find again how we welcome the stranger, how we practice hospitality, how we listen.
“A good Lent starts within us. It moves through those most closely around us. It comes into the church and it must be so generously experienced that it overflows into society. We will not really have a Good Lent until that chain is complete, and for that, we pray, may your Kingdom come.”