Forget 'you' and act for the greater good at Lent

Lent can be a time when Christians become pretty unbearable.

We get caught up in our own efforts to be ‘better’, as if Lent was about self-improvement.

It isn’t. Twenty or 30 years ago many people undertook some sort of self-denial – giving something up and giving the money to charity.

More recently there’s been the vogue for taking something up, and doing something we know we probably should do more, like pausing a moment to notice that it’s spring and the air is full of birdsong.

We know we should do it more often, but we feel that we’re too busy, so we try and get ourselves into a good habit during Lent.

And then, like all converts, we want to tell everyone about how much better our life is for drinking more water, or taking deep breaths.

There’s a great line in the old Blossom Dearie song I’m hip, which expressed all the anxiety of trying to make sure everyone knows we’re completely connected and utterly sorted: ‘I get so much out of life/ really I do’.

Of course, the whole song is about trying too hard, and I often find myself humming it during Lent.

One of the great fears of our time is that we’re not getting enough out of ourselves and our lives, and one of the great pressures is the emphasis we put on ourselves to achieve that: to experience more, to be more mindful, to get more out of life. More, more, more.

Lent gives us another excuse, to either beat ourselves up for our imagined shortcomings or to participate in a selfish, acquisitive spirituality.

Lent can be a time when we focus too much on ourselves. It can be a time when we gaze into our own small world, and loselosing a proper sense of perspective on the wider society in which we live.

Part of the work of Lent is to realign ourselves: we tend to take our bearings from within ourselves, and to work in isolation, because we imagine discipline to be internal and tightly controlled.

We think in small units: days, calories, pedometer steps. And yet it seems more in the spirit of Lent to try to cultivate a responsiveness that looks beyond our narrow field of vision.

Sometimes that will mean that we see things we don’t want to see, things that make us uncomfortable and that call us to action. It’s no good fretting over the tiny details of ourselves if we’re not attentive to the reality of other people’s concerns.

And we delude ourselves if we prize our ownpersonal development over the well-being of others, or imagine that others are less important, less fully human, less real than we are.

If we truly want tTo keep Lent we need to forget the anxiety that we might not be getting enough out of our individual lives, and attend to the common life of society.

That’s where ‘better’ might really make a difference.