Slowing down during Lent

IN THEORY, we associate Lent with moments of contemplation and tending to our inner life; in practice, it is just too often a season infused with the busyness of recent disciplines and multiplied church activity. These are pressures that we create for ourselves, in a bid to return closer; in a mission to do God’s will.

Yet, as I learned one Easter while reflecting on the part played by Simon of Cyrene on Jesus’s option to Calvary, our well-intentioned endeavours may obscure the pauses which might be vital to discovering and responding to God’s will; for our moments of pausing may be a crucial component of what God is asking of us; and — contrary to our human instincts — those stops, or apparent failings, could also be each a part of God’s plan, and essential in enabling us to pursue it.

About ten years ago, I read, in a women’s magazine, an interview with our current Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper. She described how, one weekend, she had a rare opportunity to spend a while alone, without the responsibilities of labor, or being a wife or mother. When asked how she spent those few hours, Cooper answered that she sat and gazed into space, and that it was bliss.

I read this text at a time when my very own life was an infinite wheel of Westminster pressures. I, too, was chasing rare moments of respite, working as a Private Secretary to a government minister, where life consisted of long hours within the office, evenings and weekends on the mercy of a Blackberry, overseas trips, work engagements, and the enduring threat of the destabilising news story. In this context, Cooper’s words struck a thousand chords. Nothing sounded sweeter than to take a seat and gaze into space. Yet, it wasn’t until some years later, as I sat and contemplated Jesus’s encounter with Simon on the road to Golgotha, that it began to tackle biblical resonances.

AS PART of my church’s Holy Week reflections on the Stations of the Cross, I used to be asked to think about Titian’s painting of the moment when Simon of Cyrene relieves Jesus of the cross. That process caused me to think about how we would reframe our view of pauses and collapses: how pausing was not necessarily a failing, or a break from the desire of God, but part and parcel of our journey through it.

Jesus’s encounter with Simon offers an exquisite irony: the Christ whose earthly purpose is the cross, the Christ whose best triumph is the cross, and the Christ who calls us to to take up our cross and follow him is the very one who has his cross taken from him. Yet, when that happens, he stays as he ought to be. He has not departed from the Father’s will.

As we reflect further on Christ’s Stations, we notice that Christ — the cornerstone of our faith — staggers and falls, thus offering us hope for our own trials and falterings. We, too, will stumble and fall, whether through fear, or sin, or just the pressures of day by day life. When we accomplish that, we may feel that we’re unfit for the duty, or have a way of great humiliation, or guilt.

Christ’s road to the cross changes that perspective; for Jesus is weary on the road: he has been whipped, stripped, beaten, and mocked, and — like us on our life’s path — buckles under the load of his cross. This is a striking moment of Christ’s humanity: that very humanity that we have fun at Christmas, and which makes him the empathetic, feeling High Priest to whom we are able to at all times run (Hebrews 4).

Unlike us, nevertheless, Jesus Christ is the King of Kings, the mighty lion of the tribe of Judah — and yet he, too, falls. When we ponder this, we start to understand that now we have permission to struggle or catch our breath while fulfilling our call, not only because Jesus fell, but because his surprising vulnerabilities under no circumstances put him outside the proper will of God.

SIMON’s part in Jesus’s story shows us that, when lives are lived in Christ, we are able to accept pauses not as irritations, or as obstacles, but as stages of God’s design for us. They may prove the check on our self-made goals or pressures, where God seals a unsuitable turn, or suggests a rethink. Pausing facilitates the needed transfer from man-made to God-led, and offers the space from which we gather each the strength and the angle to go on — the transition from simply operating within the flesh to moving in grace.

For clergy and others in Christian ministry, the season of Lent and Easter may feel fully immersive: Ash Wednesday observances, Lenten Bible studies, and the day by day services of Holy Week, culminating with the anguish and the triumph of the Triduum. These are busy times, and thus times after we may struggle; and yet we fail to stop. How could we? Simon of Cyrene shows us that we are able to, and that laying down our tools is just not abandoning the duty.

In our walk with Christ, whilst we seek to push into him or offer him service, allow us to take care to not be so busy constructing what we predict God wants us to construct that we leave no chink for him to construct what he knows must be built. Times of pause, and even collapse, may be needed to discern his leading. They teach us to listen to. They teach us to yield. And, contrary to what we may feel, those stops and starts can happen inside — and never aside from — our seasons of activity, comprising precisely what we require to maintain us rooted in, and equipped for, God’s will.
 

Sharmila Meadows is a contract author and journalist. A former senior policy adviser and ministerial private secretary in Westminster, she writes on cricket, faith, and politics. X: @WritingDesk27.