How do you cope if you are romantically and liturgically involved when Ash Wednesday falls on St. Valentine’s Day? A less sever conflict perhaps than when Good Friday falls on Lady Day, a problem John Donne wrestled with in verse 300 years ago, but nevertheless for traditionally inclined Christians there is a real conflict. In the world of retail there is no contest, Ash Wednesday will never have the commercial appeal of Valentine’s Day – even though hot cross buns, a commodity due as Lent concludes, have been on offer since Boxing Day.
Love or discipline? Are they in opposition? That is a conundrum the church seems rarely to have got right, but maybe that is an illusion. Maybe the problem is not so much a failure of teaching but a failure to recognise the inevitability of societal change and keep up with it. Historically there was a disparity between love (except of the most exulted variety) and discipline, it went along with the knowledge that discipline was pleasing to God. Love in its glorious, delicious, romantic manifestation was an embarrassment, maybe an un-funny joke, with barely a nod in the direction of it being from God, (and maybe it was God’s best joke of all!). Generally, the impression is that if indeed sexual love was from God, it was as a test to see if one could resist it in favour of a more spiritual version of the primary emotion.
Try telling a 21st century Christian that they should abjure sex for the whole of Lent; a teaching that was delivered in my youth. (And one was not, I think, reminded that Sundays are never days of fasting!) To the medieval mind it was an obvious discipline, just as one never engaged in sexual activity on major feast days. Of course, sex was utterly forbidden outside of marriage. Even within the married state there was little to recommend pleasure. Pleasure of any sort seems to have been suspect and the resistance to enjoyment was always viewed as pleasing to God. Here is some advice from Catherine of Siena (1347-1380): “Check your feelings with the memory of Christ’s blood and of the union of the divine and human natures. With this whole thought in mind, your wretched flesh will be ashamed of stooping to such wretchedness, will sense the odour of purity and so abide in holy matrimony with awe and fear of God.” Not quite the aphrodisiac one might have been hoping for! Similar attitudes to sexuality were still alive and well in parts of the church in the middle of the 20th century. The rest of the world had moved on!
The best of Lenten teaching has always encouraged, alongside self-denial, the discipline of doing something positive, too. For example, giving up chocolate meant one should give to the poor the money saved. It is clear that there are more useful and satisfying ways of “keeping a good Lent”. If you give up chocolate and are as consistently negative in your conversation throughout Lent, what have you achieved? The self-congratulations for such self-control. So what? Giving up negativity, i.e. wingeing, going on about the state of the world, any variant of the ‘Ow ain’t it awful?”, playing ‘poor me,’ complaining about our friends and relations; we all have our special brands of negativity, to deny ourselves that pleasure for six weeks could be life changing. At base that is what Lent is about. Even giving up watching the news for some people is a good discipline, or alternatively one can change the vibrations by praying for all the people involved in the traumata set out by the journalists for our delectation.
On the positive side I have opted for taking up playfulness and curiosity. Neuro-science lists these as the least valued or encouraged of our basic emotions. They are fundamental to life, not only human life, at that; I was fascinated to read that even the humble worm, from which humanity evolved, has a curiosity gene!
While keeping the conjunction of discipline and love in the picture I have decided to give vent to curiosity and explore some of the earliest Christian literature; recovering what the early generations of Christians thought and felt about their faith, before Christianity became the official religion of the Western world and came to govern every aspect of life. My sense is that in significant ways this period may have had more similarities to present attitudes to faith, religion, spirituality than the more codified centuries between. Then and now ‘the church’ was not the overall, official determinant of peoples’ lives as it was for the millennium that followed.
I want us to look at the literature and traditions of the Celtic church, too, known then as the British church, before it was subsumed into the Roman model. This is not an academic exercise but is rather an expression of curiosity, to see whether, in the beginning, there was a greater flexibility akin to our present thinking that might enliven attitudes to the faith today. And, alongside, through the same lens, to look with playfulness and curiosity at the Fourth Gospel.