Lent is about relationships

11 February 2008

This February a new movement has popped up. Young people have contracted to swear off grog for the month after the excesses of Christmas and New Year. The practice is called the February Fast. It would be hard not to applaud this initiative, and indeed any initiative that makes drinking a servant of sociability and not its master. It is also hard not to be reminded of Lent and of the practices of going without that we associate with it. It smells of the same return to sobriety. It goes just a little way under the skin of the daily pleasurable round to ask what we want out of life. Lent is also a time in which Christians are encouraged to look beneath the daily routine to ask what’s what. It leads up to Easter and to the events of Jesus' death and rising. Here what's what goes deep — to matters of life and death. At this level what really matters are our relationships — with God and with other people. The small things we take on or give up make sense if they focus us more deeply on these relationships. During this Lent more public matters may also take us beneath the surface of our everyday life to ask what matters. The general disturbance in financial markets, the uncertainties about the direction of the global economy and steadily rising interest rates in Australia suggest that we cannot take life for granted. Some people who are heavily indebted and with limited resources to meet repayments will be forced to reflect painfully on their commitments. All of us will be led to reflect on what matters in Australian life. When the human face of greed looks less attractive and its human hands less sure, we return to other values. Within days we await the apology to indigenous Australians. It returns us to look again, often uncomfortably, at the what’s what of our history. We confront the reality of the way in which white settlement meant indigenous dispossession and fractured and uncomfortable relationships between the original Australians and descendents of the settlers. It also offers the chance to ask how, in the light of an honest acknowledgment of our past, we want to relate in future. Frank Brennan has written of the need for the apology. Lent has no exclusive rights to suffering. World news displays

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Lent is about relationships

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