Dear Friends,

 

I often have to conduct a funeral service for someone I’ve never met. It’s always a challenge to try, as it were, to get to know that person ‘in retrospect’, if such a thing is possible; but it’s the only way to make a service personal and meaningful for the mourners.  When I visit a house to meet the family of someone who has died I try to find out, as well as biographical details, what really mattered to that person: what did they care about? What did they feel passionately about? The answers vary widely, as you may imagine. Often, quite naturally, a person’s main concern in life has been their family – faithful devotion to a spouse or partner, love of children, pride and joy in watching grandchildren grow up, perhaps even delight in great-grandchildren. Sometimes the answer is a more modest one: ‘she loved her knitting’, ‘he loved his garden’, skittles, bowls, TV soaps, begonias, the cat ….. It takes all sorts!

 

March 1st is Ash Wednesday – the beginning of Lent. As we begin the approach to Easter, we pause to remember how Jesus spent time deciding by what values he was going to live, what kind of a leader he was going to be. Was his work going to be based on power, on giving people what they wanted, or on love and service, and ministering to people’s deepest needs? Was he going to opt for an easy, comfortable life, and play it safe, or was he going to take risks and engage with bigger issues, which would lead to controversy and confrontation? The choices he made then were costly ones, which ultimately led to his death, three years later. The Christian message is still based on the values that he opted for during that time alone in the wilderness; and those values are not the ones most people live by in our materialistic, ‘what’s in it for me?’ driven culture.

 

Lent is a good time to take stock of our lives, to ask ourselves what really matters to us, what are the values by which we live – literally, to evaluate our lives. People often give things up for Lent, and that’s one way of discovering how important those little treats are, such as chocolate or alcohol – and if they’re too important, then living without them for a bit is clearly a good thing. But these are just superficial things – not the ‘stars we steer by’; and maybe we don’t spend enough time thinking about what actually are the things that really matter to us, what are the things we care about passionately.

 

If we are ‘passionate’ about something, we’re consumed by a burning desire to do something. Sometimes the word may have romantic or sexual connotations, but it actually comes from the Latin word which means to suffer, or to have suffering inflicted on us – hence ‘passive’, when something is done to us. Passions can lead to good or bad acts; sadly, we frequently see in the news examples of misplaced passion, such as fundamentalist religious beliefs which drive out the normal sensibilities of the human conscience, and lead to horrendous acts of violence, such as suicide bombings.

Perhaps the sadness is that the rest of us are not passionate enough about things that matter; we jog along in a bland sort of way, getting on with our own business, without stopping to wonder what we really care about, and doing something about it.

 

 What do you think your friends and family would say were the things that really mattered to you, the things you care passionately about?  And if the answer makes 

you think: ‘There must be more to life than this….’ well, maybe there is, and maybe Lent is just the time to start exploring what that might be.

 

With love,

Rosey