Lent Week 1: Open our Eyes to your Presence

Ever since he heard it mentioned in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, my youngest son has become obsessed with Turkish Delight. We have to buy it in bulk for him. It’s not particularly great for his teeth, so he’s only allowed one small slither a day. Yesterday morning he asked for his daily treat of Turkish Delight. I told him that if he ate it then, he wouldn’t have another treat for the rest of the day. He thought for a moment and then said: “imagine a treat that lasts forever”.

We’re now at the beginning of Lent. And it’s been a strange and difficult year, with so many churches, shops, schools, colleges, and workplaces having been closed. But this week, I challenge you to view the beginning of Lent as an opportunity to open up – to open up your eyes to God’s presence all around you. After all, through connecting with God‘s presence we connect with something of eternity. We connect with “the treat that lasts forever”, to use my son words.

But how does that relate to Ash Wednesday and to Lent? Well, the monastic tradition has always seen the contrition, the saying sorry, at the beginning of Lent as not simply being sorry for the things we have done. It’s also about being sorry for the things we haven’t done – and, in particular, according to the tradition, it is being sorry for the times we haven’t appreciated and savoured those moments of beauty, love, hope, and joy that break into our lives. The beginning of Lent gives us the opportunity to say sorry for those times and then commit ourselves to doing things differently from now on – to consciously open our eyes to where God comes to us in our lives each day.

So, this week, I encourage you, however difficult life might be at the moment, to recognise God all around you – in your daily walks, in the green shoots of nature that are starting to spring up all around us, in the birds in your gardens and parks, in your family at home or further afield, in the friendships you are fostering through text or phone calls, in the music you listen to and the films you watch, in inspirational sacrifices (such as we’re seeing from NHS workers, teachers, and other workers at the moment), or in the small moments of kindness that you witness as you go about your daily lives. By doing this, you can experience just something of that “treat that lasts forever”. Or, in the words of poet William Blake, you can experience “a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower… Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”.

This is the transcript of a video recorded for the Diocese of Llandaff. Click here to view video.

Opening our Lives can be purchased at any major online bookstore, including BRF, Amazon, Eden, Independent Booksellers, Church House, and Aslan.

Prayers for the Week

If we want to take a deep breath at the start of Lent

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to set off in a different direction

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to increase our openhearted awareness of the world around us

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to recall what we haven’t done

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to do better next time

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to stop over-complicating things

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to cut down on our tendency to catastrophise

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to keep being patient and kind

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to remember why we’re doing this

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

If we want to look beyond death to life

Lord, we ask you to

Open our eyes to your presence

Amen

With thanks to Eleanor Williams, Christ Church, Roath Park, Cardiff for the prayers each week

Why open up this Lent? Introducing ‘Opening our Lives’

“What is your binge-viewing TV recommendation?”, asked a friend of mine on Facebook recently. Over 50 people replied with their enthusiastic recommendations – from rebooted classics like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica to the contemporary trends like Tiger King and The Queen’s Gambit. We have discovered a more unusual series that is presently gripping our evenings. For Life is inspired by a true story of a wrongly-convicted prisoner in a US jail, who trains and qualifies as a lawyer so as to fight against his life sentence. Produced by, and starring, the rapper 50 Cent, it is a fascinating series. Granted my view is rather biased, as I have always been a huge fan of prison films like Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Cool Hand Luke, and Papillon. If any of these films were simply about the hardship and pain of prison, though, they would not inspire me as much as they do. What I love most about prison films and TV series is the fact that at their heart is one little word – “hope”.

It has certainly been a difficult year and the lockdowns have been particularly hard. I would never have guessed that I would spend so much time indoors in one calendar year – sometimes it does feel as if we are imprisoned. With the season of Lent on the way, I am not sure whether penance and self-denial will be top on my list of priorities this year. I usually give up chocolate, but sometimes I feel that an occasional chocolate orange or double decker is the only thing keeping me going through these difficult times!

When I started to write my new Lent Book, the word Covid was completely alien to most of us, Corona was a Mexican beer that we might occasionally enjoy on a hot summer’s day, and bubbles were things that made my kids scream with joy outside. By the time I was finishing writing, though, its theme had come to hold far deeper significance. That theme can be summed up by the title of the book: Opening our Lives. In so many ways, our lives have seemed shut down over the past year. Many of us have spent most of our days indoors, with even shopping being delivered to us. Our work patterns have changed, quite a bit of schooling has taken place at home, and appointments are increasingly on the phone or online. So, while most of us remained shut indoors, to be writing about “opening” our lives seemed hugely relevant.

After all, it is by opening our lives that we Christians can connect with that little word that runs through all my favourite prison films and TV series – hope. Lent is certainly a time when “giving up” something can be a helpful discipline. Likewise, “giving to” a charity or “taking up” particular acts of compassion can contribute so much to others. “Opening up”, though, especially at a time when our lives are so challenging, allows us to discover that hope is at the very centre of the Lenten journey. We open our eyes to recognise God’s presence, however difficult our journey. We open our ears to hear him call us to lives of transformation and justice. We open our hearts to his love, as we view the world around us as God himself sees it. We open our pain to his peace, as we allow him to be balm to our wounds. Then, on Easter Sunday, we open our lives to that wonderful hope that brings freedom and liberation despite the hardships we are facing: “hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies” (Shawshank Redemption).

Opening our Lives: Devotional Readings for Lent is the BRF Lent Book for 2021.

This blog post was originally published as a BRF Blog.