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LOVING

LENT IS FOR

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Also by Sheila Cassidy: Audacity to Believe Confessions of a Lapsed Catholic Good Friday People Light from the Dark Valley The Loneliest Journey Made for Laughter Sharing the Darkness

LOVING
A Lent Course about Love
SHEILA CASSIDY

LENT IS FOR

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Father John King M.S.C. was a missionary in Papua and New Guinea. He was very kind to me when, as a bewildered seventeen-year-old, I sought him out in his monastery in downtown Sydney because I thought God was calling me to be a nun.
First published in 2012 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ

The passage below is from one of his letters which I have treasured for over 50 years.

Copyright 2012 Sheila Cassidy The right of Sheila Cassidy to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN 978-0-232-52981-4 Still Falls the Rain from Collected Poems by Edith Sitwell reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Edith Sitwell. Excerpts from the English translation of The Liturgy of the Hours 1973, 1974, 1975, International Commission on English in the Liturgy Corporation (ICEL); excerpts from the English translation of The Roman Missal 2010, ICEL. All rights reserved. All biblical quotations are taken from The Jerusalem Bible published and copyright 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd and Doubleday and Co Inc. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Designed and typeset by Judy Linard Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

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My grateful thanks are due to my friends Clare Hallward and Michelle Copley who researched and typed for me while we were in the USA. Also to Judith Newton, without whose hard work and enthusiasm I could never have produced a finished manuscript. Lastly my thanks are due to Helen, David and Ginny who turned a manuscript into a book.

CONTENTS
Introduction 1 11 13 18 26 35 47 49 57 67 69 76 81 83 91 93 101 105

Part I: L is for ... Loving

Chapter 1: God is Love Chapter 2: How Should We Love God? Chapter 3: Hesed and the God who Forgives Chapter 4: Listening to God

Part II: E is for ... Empathy

Chapter 5: The Nature of Empathy Chapter 6: Being Alongside those in Distress

Part III: N is for ...No!

Chapter 7: Saying No! to Ourselves Chapter 8: Saying No! to Others

Part IV: T is for ... Thank You

Chapter 9: Saying Thank you to God

Part V: HOLY WEEK

Chapter 10: Holy Thursday Chapter 11: The Washing of the Feet Chapter 12: Thursday Night and Friday Morning

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Lent is for Loving

Chapter 13: Good Friday Chapter 14: Holy Saturday Chapter 15: Easter Sunday Select Bibliography

113 120 123 128

INTRODUCTION
It strikes me that Ive got a bit of a nerve to write a Lent Book when I havent personally kept Lent in the traditional way for twenty years or more. On the other hand I am not constrained by strict ideas of how Lent should be, so perhaps I can shine a new light upon this time-honoured season. As a convent educated cradle Catholic, I have, however, experienced many Lents which have been imposed upon me from the outside and even a few of which I have imposed, mostly unsuccessfully, upon myself. The Lenten attempt which I remember most clearly is the one in which I resolved on Ash Wednesday morning to give up sherry for the six weeks leading up to Easter. Alas, that evening I was so tired and fraught after my day working at the Hospice, where I was Medical Director, that I abandoned my pious resolve in under an hour! I did once give up chocolate for six weeks in an effort to lose weight but have since lost the willpower and regained the weight! Over the past ten years or so, I have developed a theory that God herself imposes a Lenten fast upon us from time to time and we are well advised to keep our strength up to cope with that when it comes. Illness, bereavement, depression, unemployment and natural disasters take their toll on all of our lives, swamping us with grief, pain and powerlessness: these days, you might almost ask who needs Lent? This month alone six young men have been killed in Afghanistan; a good friend has lost a clever and beautiful young daughter to suicide: my beloved dog has died of cancer and a policeman, blinded by a madmans bullet, has taken his own life because he felt himself to be a burden. Babies are starving in Africa and a fifteen-year-old lad was tortured and murdered because his sister and her husband thought he was a witch! Fear,

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greed, stupidity, cruelty and malice are somehow woven into the fabric of our world. No wonder Jesus gave us the parable of the wheat and the tares! Some, therefore, choose their Lents, fasting and praying and so forth. Others get their Lents thrust upon them, like my own time in a Chilean gaol forty odd years ago, or the day I found out I had cancer in both breasts and had to have a double mastectomy. The other theory that I have developed is that each period of suffering we endure is akin to a degree module: we emerge somehow wiser and with more understanding of life and its trials. Before I continue, let me make myself clear: I do not mock those who give up alcohol or chocolate for Lent: anything that strengthens our self-discipline has got to be worth the effort. I think that what Im trying to say is this: if prayer and reading and self-denial are worth doing for Lent, perhaps we should be doing them all the year round! If this sounds like a recipe for yearlong penitence and abstinence think again. Christianity is not a blueprint for repression but for joy: for a life of fulfilment beyond our wildest dreams. Did not Jesus say I have come that you may have life and have it to the full (John 10:10). In order to marshal my ideas I have taken the word LENT as an acronym: L is for LOVE E is for EMPATHY N is quite simply for: NO! and T is for THANK YOU, GOD What follows will be my understanding of how to be a Christian in these our days and in this land. My sources are largely scriptural: the Hebrew texts which Jesus was brought up on: and the four gospels.There will also be the occasional text from other great religions which so often contain a passion which surprises us, and as many fragments of poetry and song as I can get away with; because they rise daily into my consciousness whenever I sit down to pray.

PART I

L is for

LOV ING

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CHAPTER 1

GOD IS LOVE
God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, And God lives in him (1 John 4:16)

It is so wonderfully succinct, isnt it? And yet the living out of the consequences of this belief is the endeavour of a lifetime. When I first began to think to reflect on this premise, that God is love, I was reminded of the story of the devious lawyer and the parable of the Good Samaritan. St Luke tells it like this in chapter 10, verse 25:There was a lawyer who tried to catch Jesus out by asking him, Master, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Perhaps he thought he would say something not in keeping with the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus, though, turned the question back on him, asking him what he read in the Law.The Lawyers reply was this:You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself. Youre right, said Jesus do this and life is yours. Now I have been familiar with this passage since my childhood and I assumed that it was to be found in the Ten Commandments. To my surprise, however, I found that the first commandment says nothing about love, but forbids us from worshipping false gods.The second commandment prohibits the fashioning and worship of graven images while the third says You shall not utter the name of Yahweh your God to misuse it. Im sure you are familiar with the others. My point is this: Love of God (as opposed to fear and awe) comes quite a bit later in the Old Testament, as does the injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves.

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By dint of cross-referencing the texts in my annotated Jerusalem Bible I found part of the passage from Luke 10 in Deuteronomy 6:4: Listen, Israel: Yahweh your God is the one Yahweh. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge on you today to be written on your heart. Although I could find no mention of love of neighbour in this Deuteronomy passage, it was written clearly in the Book of Leviticus. After a long passage of instructions on how we should treat our neighbour, e.g. we must not deal deceitfully or fraudulently with them, or withhold a labourers wages until the following day, I stumbled on it at the end of the paragraph. After an injunction not to hate our brother it said: You must love your neighbour as yourself. I am Yahweh. (Lev.19:18) Presumably these two passages must have been linked together by the Jewish teachers long before Jesus time so that the lawyer knew them by heart, and Jesus clearly saw them as being the key to good living. One finds echoes of this theme throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. One of my great favourites is in the book of the prophet Micah and is a passage much beloved by the American Missionaries whom I met in Chile.The prophet speaks rhetorically: With what gift shall I come into the Lords presence and bow down before God on high? Shall I come with holocausts, with calves one year old? Will he be pleased with rams by the thousand, with libations of oil in torrents? Must I give my first-born for what I have done wrong, the fruit of my body for my own sin? What is good has been explained to you, man; this is what Yahweh asks of you: Only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:6)

So there we have it again: Act justly: dont steal or defraud or withhold your employees wages. Love tenderly: be kind, be generous; share your bread with the hungry and shelter the homeless poor; visit the sick; dont cheat on your wife I could go on and on. Walk humbly with your God: Im not quite so confident about paraphrasing this injunction but my guess is that it tells us to acknowledge that all we have and are and do is Gods gift to us. Our natural gifts our intellect, wisdom, creative powers are all pure gift. We are merely stewards of what we have been given. In St Johns account of the Last Supper, Jesus chooses the theme of love and service for his farewell discourse. My little children, he says, I wont be around much longer, so listen carefully: I give you a new commandment: Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another; By this love you have for one another. Everyone will know that you are my disciples. (John 13:14) Sometimes I wonder how we dare call ourselves Christians: followers of Christ.We bitch behind each others backs; we ignore the poor, the lonely and the starving. And we think that giving up chocolate for Lent will set the balance straight? Of course we dont all do this all of the time. Sometimes were really generous to our friends.We buy copies of The Big Issue and run marathons for charity. But somehow we fail to live Jesus message while getting worked up about other issues. The issue for debate this week on TVs Channel 4 is whether or not same-sex couples should be allowed to get married. The other hot one is whether the wife of a young man, paralysed from the neck down, will be breaking the law if she helps him to end his life. There is much talk from worthy Catholics and Anglicans who say that marriage is only for heterosexual couples. Would it not be better if they spent their energy protesting against the

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horrific slaughter taking place in Syria as we speak? I have no intention of coming down on one side or the other in these contentious ethical issues. I am simply reminding myself, and anyone who will listen, that at the heart of Christianity is love of God and love of neighbour. This is the lens through which we must examine the ethical questions of our day. Will the joy of a same sex couple allowed to celebrate their love and commitment to each other in this time honoured way be of no consequence to God? Does He who made two men or two women love each other not desire their health and happiness as much as He desires yours or mine? Sexual inclination is such a complex issue. Where does the desire for sadomasochistic sex come from? What are we to make of swingers? Why do men rape? Why do they molest children? My guess is that we should be worrying much more about these clearly abusive and deeply damaging inclinations than arguing about whether the proprietors of a bed and breakfast should allow two gay men to sleep in the same bed: There is room in the world for loving, There is no room for hate. (From Our World by John Harriott in Fields of Praise) Returning to the injunction that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and our neighbour as our self, I would like to spend some time asking myself and my readers just what does it mean to love God? How can we love the God we cannot see and cannot imagine? Of course we can and do imagine the man Jesus and even the risen Christ, but what about our creator, God? How can we begin to love Him (or could it even be Her?)

For reflection Read again

John 13:34; Micah 6:8

At the start of this Lenten season, take some time to think about what Lent means to you. You may want to use the time for some specific purpose; you may be experiencing a time of difficulty or barrenness; you may simply wish to focus on deepening your relationship with God. Using the LENT acronym explained in the Introduction (see p. 10), ponder on the themes to try and discern where it might lead you this Lent. Love is the central message of the Christian gospel. Spend some time considering what this means in practice. What does it mean to love God with all your heart, mind and soul, and your neighbour as yourself? Are there positive changes we can make that might make living out the message of love and service more possible? What do we need to enable this to happen in our lives?

Prayer
Lord, teach us to love one another: Both friends and foes, whole and flawed.