Lent, Faith and Clarity

Our capacity to build conclusions on what we think we see is the most useful but also the most dangerous trick in the bag. We catch a perception of something that matters,then crystalise it mentally into something we think we know. All well and good, often. But when mental ruts grind deep, what we think we see becomes more real than what’s there. Mark Twain pointed out that what makes us dumb isn’t what we don’t know — It’s what we think we know, but it’s wrong.

Faith is the capacity to hold something that could be true at arms length, accepting its apparent reality but not at face vaue. Faith is looking deeper, and lookign around. Faith is comparing our experience to other people’s within the Catholicity of a whole company of people and the Scriptures. Then faith is acting, but fully aware of the provisionality of anything we can think we know, compared to the blazing reality of God.

So this Lent I’m using Maggi Dawn’s Lent guide, Giving it Up, as a daily read. She starts with some classic meanings and disciplines of the season, but then invites us to bring our various cheished notions about God, the world and everything back to some significant Biblical passages and characters for checking, cleansing and re-envisioning. Having used Maggi’s materials for Advent before, I am very much looking forward to the journey...