The Little Book of Lent: Daily Reflections from the World’s Greatest Spiritual Writers
dare not look. The veil is lifted, and the Reality which is always there is revealed. And at once the young man sees, by contrast, his own dreadful imperfection. ‘Woe is me! For I am a man of unclean lips!’ The vision of perfection, if it is genuine, always brings shame, penitence, and therefore purification. That is the second stage. What is the third? The faulty human creature, who yet possesses amazing power of saying Yes or No to the Eternal God, is asked for his services, and instantly responds, ‘Who will go for us?’ ‘Here am I! Send me!’ There the very essence of the spiritual life is gathered and presented in a point: first the vision of the Perfect, and the sense of imperfection and unworthiness over against the Perfect, and then because of the vision, and in spite of the imperfection, action in the interests of the Perfect – co-operation with God.
HEAVEN A DANCE: AN EVELYN UNDERHILL ANTHOLOGY COMPILED BY BRENDA AND STUART BLANCH
Scripture Reading
ISAIAH 6:1–8
‘“Here am I; send me!”’
Prayer
My dearest Lord,
be thou a bright flame before me
be thou my guiding star above me
be thou the smooth path beneath me
be thou a kindly shepherd behind me
today and evermore.
ST COLUMBA (521–597)
For Reflection
John V. Taylor was Bishop of Winchester from 1975 to 1985. He was the author of The Go-Between God, which won the Collins Religious Book Award in 1973. He died in 2001.
Better Together
The Roman Catholic Archbishop Derek Worlock was a wonderful partner to the Anglican Bishop David Sheppard. They had their motto there in Liverpool: ‘We do it better together.’ That is the absolute keyword of the Christian life. It is a great mistake to present it as an individual struggle for personal salvation or holiness.
Down in the muddy sea-bed of the Lake of Galilee, they found a few years ago a boat that dates from the time of Jesus. Wonderfully preserved in the wet mud, it has now been raised and restored and is visible to visitors. They say it is typical of the larger fishing smacks that Jesus would have known. It had a square sail like an Arab dhow, but it was held together by six strong thwarts from one side to the other of the boat, with two rowers on each and a seat in the stern for the man in charge of the tiller. And that is what Jesus chose as the best device for training his followers. In Matthew’s Gospel, when the twelve are named, he puts the names in pairs, the fellow rowers, as he remembered them. For they had to learn a mutual awareness and response and absolute obedience to the whole team. We know that they had a common purse. Of course they weren’t spending all their time in fishing, but when they were doing the new work to which Jesus had called them, he sent them out two by two. There were to be no loners. Even that work must be shared. And it wasn’t all work either. When they did plan a day off, they went together. They walked together in the fields, they went up into the hills as a group, they ate together. That was most important of all. Did you know that there are ten different meals recorded in the Gospels, an extraordinary thing for a book of spiritual guidance. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and we have remembered him ever since simply doing this.
So during the six weeks of Lent, how about using these weeks of discipline to put down the natural loner in myself, to cut out the first person singular from my programme, to cultivate the plural of the kingdom of God, and to give priority to those activities that I share? So each of us may come to Passiontide and Holy Week and Easter with a clearer understanding and appreciation of the one pain and the one power.
THE EASTER GOD JOHN V. TAYLOR
Scripture Reading
ST MATTHEW 4:18–22
‘Immediately they left their nets and followed him.’
Prayer
Grant to me, O Lord, to know what is worth knowing,
to love what is worth loving,
to praise what delights you most,
to value what is precious to you,
and to reject whatever is evil in your eyes.
Give me true discernment,
so that I may judge rightly between things that differ.
Above all, may I search out and do what is pleasing to you;
through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.
THOMAS À KEMPIS (c.1380–1471)
For Reflection
David Torkington is a lecturer, retreat conductor and spiritual director with a great gift for explaining the tradition of Christian prayer in a meaningful way. He is also the author of Inner Life: Fellow Traveller’s Guide to Prayer and How to Pray: A Practical Guide.
God’s Inexhaustible Love
People like to present Jesus as the model for Christian action, by showing He was so uncompromisingly available to all men. They often fail to realise that He was only able to be open to all men, because He was first open to God. It was only because He had exposed Himself without restraint to God’s love that He was able to be filled with the fullness that He could communicate to others. Without the hidden years, the desert, the lonely garden or the inner room, there would be no compassion for the needy, no love for the loveless, no healing for the sick.
To follow Him, doesn’t mean that we should try and copy Him as an artist copies a model. It does not mean that we should merely imitate the outward manifestation of the inner light that burned in Him, it means that we must expose ourselves to that self-same light that it may set us afire too.
I had now come to realise that there is only one source of energy to revitalise man. It is only when the dynamic rays of God’s inexhaustible love begin to permeate the very marrow of our inmost being that we receive the strength to stand upright and grow, to ripen and bud under its influence, and finally to open out, to blossom forth. Without this source of light, we’ve no more chance of growing than a drooping geranium in a dark room.
We can only begin to expose ourselves to the Light, if we are fundamentally convinced that we cannot grow without it. This is why the proud, the pompous and the pretentious will never be able to see the direction of the Light, let alone expose themselves to it. Once we see clearly that the spiritual life begins with God, everything else begins to slot into place. It does not begin firstly with us trying to love Him, or other people for that matter, but with trying to allow His love to burst into our lives.
If we first seek the Kingdom of God then everything else will fall into place. Only when this process gets under way properly will we be radically and fundamentally renewed, will we be able to love Him in return, create community and enter into others in a way and on a level we never envisaged before. All this will be possible not just by the power of our love, but because another will live in us, and love with, and through us.
PETER CALVAY: HERMIT RAYNER [DAVID] TORKINGTON
Scripture Reading
ST