In the fight against injustice, the targets have always been relative to the aim. The Suffragettes targeted those denying women the right to vote. Civil Rights activists targeted those discriminating on racial grounds. Stonewall will fight for LGBTQ+ people to be “free to be proud, free to be loved, free to be together, free to be who we are” by targeting all those arenas in which they do not see this happening.
There wouldn’t, for example, be any point in Stonewall targeting a rainbow flag-waving, free love hippie commune which already supports all of its aims.
Likewise, the devil is not interested in those already happily doing his work. He will leave them well alone to enjoy themselves. He, like anyone with any wit about them, will go where the fight is to be had. And there is much more than human wit about the devil.
His primary target is the Church and especially a Church that is entering the solemnity of Lent. I recently discovered a faith journey that my mum (born 1937) had written. She grew up on the east coast of Ireland and recalled: “Lent was a long and difficult time. In the days before Vatican II, it was usual for everyone to fast during Lent, and Good Friday was the darkest day of all.”
We have lost something of this darkness today. It is partly because life has become so easy and pleasure so immediate that the devil does not disturb. But like the monster alerted by the snap of a twig, our fasting, sacrifice and mortifications draw his attention. The deeper we enter into the season of Lent the harder we can expect to find it – how can any of us look at a crucifix and be surprised by this?
“I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the Cross’,” wrote John Stott.
“In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world.
“But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.”
Penance and mortification are a small but essential part of the Christian life. Our natural drive towards personal comfort so often prevents us from answering the Christian call to love God and serve others for love of God. When we voluntarily accept discomfort, we join ourselves to the sufferings of Christ and ask Him to use them in His redemptive work; a work that the enemy wants to prevent because he knows only too well the power of it.
It is perhaps no surprise that my mum, whose faith journey reveals her hope to one day become a saint, died during the season of Lent after a long period of pain and suffering; a period which she spent offering it all up. I think of this, and the words from her childhood journal, as I prepare for Lent each year.
“I was sitting on the rock,” she wrote, “enjoying the sound of the waves crashing against the shore and the sight of the mountains sweeping down to the sea. As the seagulls swooped overhead, strands of seaweed were being tossed around by the waves. The seaweed reminded me of how I sometimes felt in life, being tossed about. Then there seemed to be a moment of absolute stillness and I felt the presence of a supreme being, greater than the sea, the mountains or the universe, and this being cared about me…I knew then, that in life I would be tossed about like this seaweed, but that God would always be there to guide, to protect and to help me.”
This faith saw her through the many dark times in her life, which I believe, when united to Christ’s own suffering, led to my redemption.
Today many souls are in need of such sacrificial love. There are unrelenting calls for people to ignore reality, to reduce a man to his actions, to eradicate our God-given identity and replace it with a false, man-given disguise. This is a tale as old as time.
We all know who wants to steal our identity from us, get us to doubt that we are imago dei. We have heard his sinister whispers, for example in the wilderness as he tempts Jesus saying “if you really are the son of God…”. And in our own lives when the doubts creep in: “come on…surely God wouldn’t allow his own child to suffer this way” and “He told you that a father would not give a stone to his son who asks for bread, yet He claims to be your father in heaven and doesn’t give you what you want”.
During Lent, as the enemy steps up his attacks, we need to stand firm to protect our identity as children of God and trust that our sacrifices (no matter how small) when united to Christ’s, will make a difference.
“God has created me to do Him some definite service…I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next” (St John Henry Newman).
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