RITE AND REASON:While there may be truth in the suspicion that Christianity is 'unnatural', we must see this stems from our being more than creatures of instinct, writes MARTIN HENRY
LENT, INTERESTINGLY enough, gets its name at least not from any specifically Christian or even religious notion, but from an Old English word for spring. It’s a word that’s thought to be connected with the idea of length, hence with the time when the days begin to lengthen, as happens in spring.
Usually we tend to imagine Lent as a serious, solemn, even joyless, and penitential time of year – a time when we’re urged to take on various kinds of penance, and try to deny ourselves some of the physical pleasures of life, to eat and drink less, for instance, to improve our spiritual life.
Exercises of self-denial or, as it used to be called, mortification of the body and its appetites and passions – were supposed to help tame the selfish appetites of the flesh and make the life of the soul thereby healthier.
But the season of spring seems far removed from any notion of self-denial or mortification. It conjures up almost exactly the opposite kind of reality. Spring is the season when nature comes back to life again after appearing to have been almost dead all through the winter. It’s a season, therefore, that would seem to be more in tune with ideas of self-development, self-realisation, self-fulfilment even, rather than with potentially gloomy thoughts about self-denial or self-sacrifice.
So why, in what should be a joyful, even exhilarating period of the year’s natural cycle, does the church see fit to locate the season of Lent? What message is being conveyed by this choice, by this juxtaposition or coincidence of nature’s rebirth with the church’s most urgent invitation to us to practise at least for the 40 days of Lent some kind of self-renunciation or self-denial?
Does this not just go to show yet again how unnatural, how even inherently inhuman Christianity fundamentally is? That certainly has been an accusation frequently levelled at the Christian church, and not just in modern times. And, when one considers some of the more extreme penances Christians have been tempted to inflict on themselves over the centuries, there is perhaps a grain of truth in such accusations.
But that grain may also point in a more promising direction. For while there may be some truth in the suspicion that Christianity is unnatural, it’s equally important to see that being “unnatural” is not necessarily such a bad thing. At least not for humanity.
Human beings are not locked into nature to the extent that other species seem to be. In that sense, we are not just part of nature. We aren’t purely “natural”. We don’t operate completely by instinct. We can change our minds; we can have second thoughts about things.
So perhaps the wisdom of the church’s choice of spring as the Lenten season lies in the need to remind us that there is a discrepancy between our rhythms and the rhythms of nature. Spring ushers in year by year the rebirth or reawakening of nature, but the rebirth we need isn’t so predictable or so accessible.
Indeed, the very coming of spring can even cruelly underline for many people the difference between the burgeoning, blossoming state of nature and the desolation of their own mind and heart. “When will my spring come?” is the last line of an ancient Latin poem, written by someone who was clearly acutely aware of the divergence between nature’s newly found life and his own inner barrenness.
In that sense, in diverting our attention away from nature and towards another reality in the season of Lent, the church, far from being condemned or chided for being unnatural and inhuman, should perhaps be seen rather as supremely human and realistic.
For Christianity still holds out belief in the possibility of rebirth and new life for humanity. But it’s a rebirth and a new life that doesn’t come from nature. It comes from God.
Rev Dr Martin Henry is lecturer in dogmatic theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth