THOUGHTS TO PONDER

I was surprised on my first post-New-Year sortie to the supermarket to discover half an aisle devoted to Easter eggs! Consumerism appears to abhor a vacuum. Do people really ‘shop early for Easter’, as they are exhorted to do for Christmas?

One of the things I like about both Advent and Lent is that they provide a buffer, a time of reflection and preparation for the celebration of Incarnation and for remembrance of the Easter story. The liturgical calendar encourages a rather different focus than the drive of market forces as we move through the year – a framework, if you like, for keeping before us the reality of non-material values.

Lent will begin this year on February 6^th. In many cultures there is a tradition of giving a tenth of yearly income to some holy or charitable use. For Christianity roughly a tenth of the year is similarly given over, and to reflection and meditation about who, what and whose we are. We follow Jesus who, after his baptism by John in the Jordan went into the wilderness to embrace the fullness of his humanity. It meant grappling with some tough questions (personified as the Devil). It meant resisting the seductiveness of power, failing to meet the expectations of those who wanted him to be the kind of messiah they were looking for, and preparing to set his face towards Jerusalem and inevitable confrontation with religious and secular authorities…

Frederick Buechner, an American minister and author, offers a few contemporary questions we might choose to think about during Lent:

–If you had to bet everything you had on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money, and why?

–Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?

–Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?

–If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?

They are the sort of questions that we may not ever have asked ourselves. Living with such questions may not be a comfortable ride, so may want to opt for the ‘too busy’ orbit. Yet the answers we give reveal much of who we are and what we really value. Perhaps this Lenten season instead of ‘giving up’, one possible commitment might be to take time to ponder on what it means to have been made ‘imago Dei’ – in the image of God…

Mary McMahon