I’m just back from my annual retreat at Mirfield, home from home for me with its beautiful plainchant, wise monks and memories of priestly formation there.
On retreat you refresh your sense of the Church tackling your ‘individualitis’, the bad ways you get into spiritually, engaging more with the church’s worship and discipline of prayer alongside self-examination helped by a companion retreat conductor.
We can’t all find time to go on retreat but we all have the invitation of Lent which is the church’s annual retreat, her invitation to tackle DIY Christianity and renew grasp of the church’s fellowship and teaching.
On my travels around the Diocese covering vacancies I was given a book by Andrew and Rachel Wilson from Eastbourne about the experience of parenting not one but two autistic children. I’ve read philosophical defences of God in the face of suffering and much ecclesiology but ‘The Life You Never Expected’ surprised me with its deep insight on God and the Church. They compare their experience to emperor penguins huddling over their eggs through months of frozen darkness which explains the penguin cover. ‘This is almost unbearable, and it's almost worth quitting, but the sun is on its way. Hang in there’.
They gave me that word ‘individualitis’, a term for what’s plaguing our culture and parts of the church, especially their own Evangelical tradition with such prioritising of the individual’s one-to-one with God. Andrew and Rachel testify to discovering Christianity as a corporate entreprise, helped as they are in their struggle to survive as parents by the counsel and companionship of fellow Christians. I quote them: ‘In God’s global mission, the role of extraordinary people doing exceptional things is probably far smaller than we imagine - and the role of ordinary people doing everyday things is probably far greater than we imagine.
They gave me that word ‘individualitis’, a term for what’s plaguing our culture and parts of the church, especially their own Evangelical tradition with such prioritising of the individual’s one-to-one with God. Andrew and Rachel testify to discovering Christianity as a corporate entreprise, helped as they are in their struggle to survive as parents by the counsel and companionship of fellow Christians. I quote them: ‘In God’s global mission, the role of extraordinary people doing exceptional things is probably far smaller than we imagine - and the role of ordinary people doing everyday things is probably far greater than we imagine.
If you think you’re exceptional, that will come as a nasty shock. But when you get mugged by life, and find out just how ordinary you are, it’s thoroughly liberating. Carl Trueman was right: ‘My special destiny as a believer is to be part of the church; and it is the church that is the big player in God’s wider plan, and not me’’.
That last quote touched my heart and mind by its admission of how Christians are in Christianity more effectively together and not just individually. Christ is head of a body we’re part of for ever, God’s never-ending family, ‘the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’.
Lent’s ahead for us then as a body building operation not in the gym but in a spiritual gym, that deepening we seek of our individual sense of the body of the Church. We have plenty of choice to meet with others with Lent courses locally and elsewhere - I’m joining St Martin-in-the-Fields course on St Augustine’s Confessions - or online if you’re connected that way, as I know a good number of us are even when we’re in New Zealand!
Even if Lent reduces to recapturing the Friday fast, making our Confession, going to a weekday Mass or committing to Holy Week services we have set before us an invitation to check the ‘individualitis’ blinding our sense of the Church and hiding God and neighbour from us. As Pope Francis asks in his booklet on holiness, a Lent resource I commend in Faith in Sussex, ‘What endures, what has value in life, what riches do not disappear? Surely these two: the Lord and our neighbour. These two riches do not disappear’.
May Lent enrich us as the retreat it is, deepening our love for God and neighbour, turning us that bit more inside out as we prepare to renew our baptismal vows at the Easter Festival.
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