From the Rector

Dear Everybody, hello again.

Everybody has little quirks about the home.  It may be asking everyone to take off shoes to protect carpets, plumping up the cushions as soon as you stand up, or making sure that mugs are stacked in the same order.  Mine is taps.

I think it came from my time in London when plumbers could be expensive and unpunctual.  Anything but get a plumber in.  So I ended up getting shirty with my housemates if they screwed the taps down. “Turn them off gently or you’ll wreck the washers.”  “It doesn’t matter if the tap drips once or twice, it only matters if the tap stays dripping; don’t screw it down. It’s not an enemy.”  You get the picture.  Possibly obsessive, but protective of my poor defenceless taps.

And now I’m thinking about Lent and Lenten disciplines.  If you give something up in Lent, is it because you’re trying to screw yourself down as if you’re the enemy; or do you want to give something up in order to stop the drip-drip-drip of all the waste that goes on in your life?  The waste of time, of calories, of mental and spiritual energy, the waste of your focus.

If you just want to stop the flow of uselessness, all you need to do is to turn yourself off gently.  All the pundits about diet say that starving yourself is very bad for you as well as counter-productive to dieting.  And I think that in your spiritual dieting, screwing yourself down just wrecks your spiritual washers and makes you a lot harder to turn on.

So whether you’re a Christian observing a Lenten discipline (starting on Ash Wednesday, February 21), or someone who wants to break a habit, be gentle with yourself.  You’re not the enemy.

God bless you this Lent

David Head