6 April – Sylvia Roberts, St Peter’s Church

How is Lent for you?

Here we are once again in the middle of the season of Lent and somehow this year it seems more precious – even essential – than usual. Why might that be I wonder?

I am not a person who likes a lot of routine. I have never had a weekly timetable for my housework or for our daily meals. When I walk to the shops for provisions, I like to vary my route and although I write and telephone friends and family often, I would hate to be someone who “always does that on a Friday!” In my working life, of course, I had an imposed framework. I had to be at work at a certain time and work for my contracted hours in order that my colleagues and I could co-operate and make the whole thing work but even within these parameters I liked to discover as much variety and spontaneity as possible.

But two weeks ago, I tested positive for Covid and as my daily life has become a tangle of sleeping and waking at unpredictable times and eating, showering, praying and dressing in equally chaotic ways I see, very clearly, the comforting beauty of some sort of framework to life.

The Church’s year follows the same pattern each year. Advent moving into Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Easter and on into Pentecost and Ordinary Time. I know that some find this regularity restricting and stultifying – while others find comfort and even freedom within the festivals and fasts. I don’t recall ever feeling so grateful for the steady, regular drumbeat of the Church’s year as I have this year. The beat goes on regularly, gently, sometimes muffled but always there without my input but waiting for me when I am able to respond.
In my days of isolation as I have watched the cities of Ukraine being battered into rubble and millions of people, who look just like us, fleeing, hiding, coping and dying I am so especially conscious of the preciousness of a framework for our daily lives, of how fragile and all too easily damaged that framework can be and of how even a tiny, familiar, treasured item can bring comfort and help in clinging on to some fragment of sanity in the overwhelming chaos.

Value Lent. Pray for Ukraine. Look forward to Easter.