Saturday: Week 3 in Lent Year B

Lent for Everyone
Mark Year B
WEEK 3:SATURDAY...

...I sat for two hours with a young man who could not believe in God’s love.
When I say ‘could not’, that is quite literally how it seemed. He could not believe in God’s love in much the same way that he was physically incapable of running a mile in three minutes or lifting a car off the ground with his bare hands. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand what I was saying. Nor had he thought through a set of logical arguments that demonstrated to his mental satisfaction that either there wasn’t a God or, if there was, he couldn’t be a God of love. It was – with the distressing predictability that clergy and counsellors know only too well – that deep down in his memory and imagination there was a sense of unlovedness: of family and teachers telling him he was no good; of never being praised or cherished or celebrated. No doubt there was praise and celebration at various times. But the abiding, life-forming memories are of condemnation, criticism, put-downs. Being made to feel inferior, stupid, weak. So the capacity to receive love, to feel love, to understand love, had been covered over as though with a thick, calloused, leathery skin.

Perhaps we need to think into that sad, depressing frame of mind in order to hear again, with full force, words that have become so well known that they are in danger of forming part of a Christian’s mental wallpaper, the pattern so familiar that we no longer notice it...

Taken from Lent for Everyone Mark Year B by Tom Wright