A friend of mine once remarked that the church is like a swimming pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end. And it’s true. So much of the noise that dominates the life of the Church, from the parish to the global level, is generally concerned with matters of some superficiality.
Much of parish life can seem to be dominated by disagreements over the latest proposed change, differing priorities or conflicts of personality. And all this distracts us from what really ought to be at the heart of parish life which is a quieter, deeper reality: the turning of hearts towards truth and goodness, the gentle healing brought about by the forgiveness of sins, the simple solidarity shown in small acts of kindness. It does go on, day in day out. But we don’t hear much noise from the deep end of the pool.
And in the wider church too we now have a mass media that amplifies the trivialities of church disagreements and broadcasts them to an already sceptical public to confirm their sense of our irrelevance. So at the national and global level, the shallow end is all we hear about. Yet the unsung reality of the global church is of an indispensable force for justice and peace, transforming lives and communities each and every day. It’s the quiet depth of prayer and heartfelt worship that connects the material world with its transcendent source.
Lent is about leaving the shallow end to swim out into the deep end. It’s the time to listen to Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to “push out into the deep”. Giving up something you enjoy as a Lenten discipline serves no purpose at all unless it creates space to deepen our seriousness about Christian living.
The first question to ask as we go into Lent is what is it that keeps us from risking the deep end? What is it about the noisy shallow end that we find so comfortable and reassuring? I wonder in fact if the shallow end is actually a place where it’s quite easy to hide. I don’t mean hiding from one another, the shallow end of the church is always full of prominent personalities seeking to exert their influence and control. I mean hiding from the true meaning and purpose of church life itself. I mean hiding from God.
Could it be that all our preoccupation with surface issues (Heritage, music, other peoples’ moral lives) provides displacement activities to keep us from engaging seriously with what is both rather frightening, but also most liberating about our faith? Are we hiding from the demanding imperatives of the gospel? Are we hiding from the idea that God might make a real claim on us, might truly shape us and set us on a new path? Are we hiding from our own mortality and filling our church life with trivia to distract us from the thought that we will one day see God face to face and be held to account for how we have lived our lives?
These are difficult, penetrating questions, rather like the question Jesus puts to the Pharisees “Which of you is without sin?” This is a question that cuts through the trivia of moral condemnation and prurience. The Pharisees had thought that they took God seriously. But in fact, they were in the shallow end, seeking the lazy path to holiness by settling for holier than thou. This whole story is an invitation to go deeper into the life of faith, deeper into love. And from it we might draw two insights for our observance of Lent: firstly to go deeper into ourselves and secondly to go deeper into others.
People in the shallow end are so often characterised by a lack of self-awareness, the ability to reflect on why we might feel strongly about things and why we might find it hard to show graciousness and forgiveness. Take, for example, the conflicts in the church today over sexuality. Don’t we all have a complex story to tell about the passions and fidelities of our bodies as well as their frustrations and jealousies? Aren’t simple noisy answers to these questions, from any quarter, something of a hiding from self-knowledge? It has been remarked that the religious communities (those embodiments of depth within the church) have had little to say on the current question of lesbian and gay people in the church. Surely this has much to do with the depth with which they know themselves and their own struggles. “Anyone who knows the complexities of the true celibate vocation would be the last to have any sympathy with the extraordinary idea that sexual orientation is an automatic pointer to the celibate life” (Rowan Williams)?
We will take our faith more seriously if we know ourselves better, our desires and our motivations and make them open to the depths of God. Today I had to attend the funeral of a profoundly Christian woman who served for 25 years as a headteacher in a very demanding inner city school. Among the hymns she chose was “O love that will not let me go” which contains a line that perfectly expresses the way she lived her life:
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow,
May richer, fuller be.
So we should take the opportunity this Lent to journey further into the depths of ourselves and open them to the depths of God that we might be spiritually richer and fuller. This will happen particularly in times we set aside for silent reflection, times of openness and honesty to ourselves and to God.
But Lent isn’t just introspection. We need to journey into the depths of one another. By that I don’t mean an intrusive and rather un-English invading of one another’s lives or even the crass call to chumminess that can sometimes prevail in the modern church. I mean an attentiveness to who other people are, where they’re coming from, what their struggles might be and how they might see life in ways different from ourselves. I sometimes think this gospel story is really a miracle story. It is the miracle of Jesus enabling arrogant, tribal and aggressive men suddenly to empathise with a vulnerable, humiliated, fearful woman. Their previous inability to do that was part of their spiritual shallowness.
Christian life is life together. And again I want to emphasise that that does not necessarily mean being friends with everyone or forming a single social unit. That’s in fact more likely to be an exclusive community. Christian life together is something different. It’s recognising that on our shared pilgrimage of life and faith we need each other. We need each other’s skills and gifts. But we also need each other’s insights and perspectives. We need to understand what other people feel, what they fear and how they see truth.
What is so wonderful about these 14 paintings displayed around our church is that they do precisely this. 14 members of our congregation have made themselves vulnerable to us by showing us something from their hearts of how they view Christ, of what his suffering means to them and how they wrestle to understand it. I hope that one of the ways in which we might respond to this exhibition is by following their lead and that in our Lent groups and in our more informal discussion perhaps we might be able to deepen our faith together by reflecting honestly on what we believe in what we doubt, what we hope for and what we are afraid of.
Just like displaying your artwork in church, that leaves you vulnerable. But plucking up the courage to leave the shallow end and swim out into the deep will always make us vulnerable and fearful. It’s when there are others swimming around us that we feel more reassured.