BBC Radio 4 2016-02-10

BBC Radio 4 2016-02-10

Good morning. Today is Ash Wednesday which for Christians is a day of fasting and abstinence to mark the beginning of Lent. I have to admit that I am absolutely hopeless at fasting and not much better at abstinence. The problem is that in my small corner of the Christian world there are no set rules. If I were a Muslim I would keep the sunrise to sunset fast of Ramadan. Everyone would be doing the same and this would hold me to the discipline without it being anything exceptional. If I were an Orthodox Christian Lent would begin quite gently, no meat this week, no dairy next, and then progress in intensity until reaching a total fast in Holy Week. Again everyone would be doing the same.

The Catholic Church says no meat on Fridays and on total fast days like today one full meal is allowed and two small snacks. Which leaves some room for personal improvisation. But, the Church of England doesn’t really produce rules, only suggestions, which mean if your are going to do fasting and abstinence you have to make it up.

So, as my friends and I have been asking each other, ‘what are you giving up for Lent’, and here I am breakfastless on Ash Wednesday and I haven’t got a clue. Experience suggests that t once you have to make it up on your own it all becomes a bit stressful. Should I give up alcohol this year as I used to, religiously, in the 1970s. Or coffee? Or, as I did another year, tomato sauce. That was pretty successful – it permanently weaned me off a whole lot of other delights, such as sausage rolls and bacon sarnies. But you can see the way this is going. A made-up Lent is all about self-improvement, like those new year diets full of mushed up kale and spinach and avocados which are so penitential that they must be doing you good. And the reward of such do-goodery is a warm glow of self-regard.

The Lent that I remember most was when I decided to work out why I sometimes lost my rag at things and people. I traced my occasional outbursts of anger back to anxiety, to feeling out of control. That was a very uncomfortable feeling; a sense of being very small and fragile, blown about on the winds of fate. It occurs to me that feeling very small may have something to do with where we actually in this universe, and if you are a believer, where you are in the presence of God, who does not despise our littleness but holds us lovingly in life and through death. A self-invented fast could take you in the wrong direction, but being small – humility - brings you back to the core of things, to find not the terror I initially felt, but peace in the knowledge that we are indeed just dust and that to dust we shall return.

First broadcast 10 February 2016