Lent is difficult. We don’t like giving up things. We don’t like denying ourselves. We don’t like penance very much. Because it is so hard. And Easter always seems so very far away. Our Lord spent forty days in the desert, and that wasn’t easy: the heat, the cold, the hunger. Lent is supposed to be long. And difficult. We are supposed to feel our self denial and our penance. It is supposed to be a wilderness time. A time of testing.

In fact, we are not called to do or be anything during the forty days of Lent that we are not called to do or be during the rest of the year — or the rest of our lives. Yes, we give up chocolate or wine or biscuits for Lent, or pray more, or give a bit more to charity. But this is symbolic: it’s meant to represent the fundamental attitude of our whole life. It is meant to symbolise our obedience to the command of Christ — Repent, and believe the Good News — and that command is not just for Lent. It’s for the whole of our lives.

Repent. Turn away from sin. Turn away from anything and everything that keeps us from God. We must turn from our own pleasure, our own comfort and convenience, our own will. We are not the centre of the universe; it’s not all about me. I must turn away from myself, so that I can turn back to God and to other people.

Repent, and believe the Good News. To say that we repent is easy enough; even confessing to a priest is not all that difficult — despite what we might sometimes feel. It is the believing that is, surprisingly, the harder part. Christ himself called believing “work”. When the people asked him: “What must we do if we are to do the works that God wants?” Our Lord answered: “This is working for God: you must believe in the one he has sent.”

Believing is hard work because it inescapably includes works. As St James tells us: Faith without good works is dead. So when Our Lord says we must believe, he also means we must do the works of believing. We have to live what we believe. We have to put our faith into practice. If we believe that Christ is the Beloved Son of God, we have to listen to him, and do what he tells us, and change our lives.

There is no way to get from Oxford to London except by car, bike, bus or train (when they are running). We can’t just believe ourselves there. Our pilgrimage of faith — our journey through this Christian life — is like that: step by step. Mass by Mass. Confession by confession. Communion by communion. Prayer by prayer. Good deed by good deed.

On Ash Wednesday we came once again to the edge of the desert, which we have to cross. It will be difficult; just as life as a whole can be difficult. It requires a bit of work on our part.

But, lest we get discouraged after the first tough week, the Church gives us the story of the Transfiguration on the second Sunday of Lent. We heard again how Christ went up a high mountain with three of his disciples and was transfigured in their presence. His glory is allowed to peek through his humanity and shine out, for just a moment. Not for his sake, but to reveal to Peter, and James, and John, and to us, that even though he was about to suffer, even though it would soon become very difficult to be his disciples, he is the Lord. He would rise from the dead, and then we would see his glory. He told them that he would conquer death, and transform suffering, and defeat sin. That they — and we — must not be afraid.

The Transfiguration was to confirm and strengthen their faith and give them courage for the trials they were to undergo — the passion of Christ, the preaching of the Gospel, and their own martyrdoms too.

The disciples did what any of us would do. They wanted to build tents so that they could capture and hold on to the experience of the Transfiguration. They wanted to stay there. But it was not yet Easter, and there was much left to happen. They had to return to ordinary life. To the difficulties of human existence. To the trials of being disciples of the Lord.

The Transfiguration — and, indeed, our annual celebration of Easter itself — is a preview of heaven, a little glimpse to sustain us and encourage us on the journey of Lent, and the journey of life. It points to our final destination — the glory of life with Christ in the world to come. But it tells us that we are not there yet. God gives each of us glimpses of himself. He gives us all sorts of spiritual consolations and experiences, moments of joy and happiness in our lives. But we can’t stay in those moments. They don’t last very long. We have to come back down again from the mountain to the business of life; the work of repenting and of believing.

We now find ourselves a week into Lent. It always seems to be around now that the packet of Jaffa Cakes left lurking at the back of the cupboard starts to call out to us the loudest. When we start thinking about what to give up for Lent, it’s all too easy to get swept up in a bit of ascetic bravado and set ourselves quite the challenge. This time last week, Ash Wednesday, was a fast day — that’s alright, it’s only a day after all, it’ll be over soon. But now we find ourselves with a good long road stretching out ahead through the rest of Lent. The light (or perhaps, the Creme Egg) at the end of the tunnel seems too far off to even make out — and we find ourselves wanting to give up on the Lenten fast we chose.

But the great thing is to persevere: it is not he who begins, but he that perseveres to the end, who shall be saved. We must remember, of course, to set ourselves bite-sized goals. Our holy father St Philip taught that “One of the most excellent means of obtaining perseverance is discretion; we must not wish to do everything at once, or become a saint in four days.” We can’t give everything up at once, because we are human: we know our own nature, and that our strength — or at least our good grace — would fail us if we gave too much up, and then we would give up our good practices and be no better than we were on Shrove Tuesday. But we must persevere in what we have given up! One of our Lenten Devotions here at the Oratory is the Stations of the Cross every Friday evening during Lent, and as we go round the church we sing the Stabat Mater, the Sequence in honour of Our Lady of Sorrows. It reminds us:

At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.

Our Lady stood faithfully through the bitterest trial a person can face: seeing her innocent Son crucified for the sins of the world. But it was there, in the midst of his Passion, that Our Lord gave her to us to be our Mother, too. Her prayers help us through our Lenten fasts, as we journey to join her at the foot of her Son’s Cross on Good Friday.

By the Cross with thee to stay,
There with thee to weep and pray,
Is all I ask of thee to give.

It’s ever so tempting to cave in, but if we manage to persevere in this we can go on to even greater things. It’s a little like those incessant adverts for the Royal Navy that used to be shown while you were waiting for your film to start in the cinema — if you can fix a skateboard you can fix a bike, and then all of a sudden you’re fixing an aircraft carrier. The spiritual life is much the same, really: Lent gives us a chance to fix our skateboards. If we can persevere through these few weeks giving up some little treat we enjoy, like having a Jaffa Cake with our morning coffee, then we can leave a little more room in our hearts for loving our neighbour. And if we can love our neighbour a little more, we can love those people we don’t really like very much some more, too. And if we can love them, we can love God a little more. And when we are finally called to fix the celestial aircraft carrier, we can hear those sweet words of Our Lord: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in little things; I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.’

Lent is upon us, how exciting! It is really something one ought to look forward to — all the penance and sacrifice yes, but not to look forward to those things because we are Jansenists (some of my closest friends are of course, a much-misunderstood heresy) or because we are odd people who enjoy suffering, but rather because it is an opportunity to return to essentials. It is this marvellous opportunity to return with all our heart to Our Lord Jesus Christ and through our little efforts to know him more clearly, love him more dearly, and follow him more nearly.

The Lenten penances we give ourselves have to have that in mind; and they really ought to be things which are designed to make us really realise each day of Lent that we are doing whatever we are doing (or not, as the case may be) because we want to do something for God, and for our life with him. The obvious thing is to give up little luxuries or what might really be, or what we are told we must consider to be, vices. Here we have to be circumspect and honest — are we giving up sweets and cigarettes because it will bring us closer to Christ, or because we want to be thin and have more money in the bank? Will foregoing a glass of wine really help us to root out sin, or will it just make us a bore at dinner parties? Whatever sacrifices we make, and we must make some — sacrifice is the only real test of our love — we have to do it with him at the heart of it. Recent popes have all spoken of this, suggesting instead we give up wasting time on screens (not right now, you have to read to the end of this) so we can give more time to prayer, stop gossiping so people can trust us again, stop complaining and give way instead to compassion, gentleness, and kindness. It is an old mistake to think holiness consists in non-sinning or not doing ‘bad things’ rather than also making efforts, real efforts, to grow in virtue.

We are told very often in this period that Lent is an opportunity to go out into the desert; that is to join Christ in the desert when he was thrown there by the Holy Spirit after his baptism to be tempted and tried and so to give us a model of our own penance and spiritual warfare. What does that look like really? A friend of mine (decidedly not one of the Jansenist ones) always took this literally, and spent a week of Lent at a luxury resort in Sharm El Sheikh. For him that was getting away: from phone calls, e-mails, all the noise that surrounds us. We can’t all do that, or particularly want to I suppose, but we must use Lent as that opportunity for silence and quiet, just to give the Lord a little more opportunity to speak to us and call us back to him. We have to work; we can’t always disappear off on a retreat, but that is why Christ reminds us that we are in the world, but not of it. We do not always have to have our phone superglued to our hands or know everything that is going on in the world. Perhaps it is simply an opportunity to discover the ‘off’ button on our devices, no matter how terrifying that might be. There’s a sign one sees occasionally in churches reminding people to turn off their phone — because God does want to speak to you, but he’s unlike to do so through a telephone.

And when we do turn if off — well what do we do then? Suddenly there are all these little gaps in the day. Well then we give God a chance to get through to us; we can pray; we can read that spiritual book we’ve always put off and let God encourage us; we can rediscover what it is all about. And we can do things to help him give us that good shake we need in Lent to get back on that narrow path.

Here at the Oratory there is ample opportunity to meet him: in the Mass, in the confessional, at Adoration, walking with him along the Stations of the Cross, or simply coming into church rather than rushing by. Others help us too of course and we have Men’s Oratory, Women’s Oratory, Young Adults, and Secular Oratory too. We will have our Lenten Talks on Saturday mornings, drawing inspiration and encouragement from ‘Saints for Sinners’ with an array of guest speakers. Which of those will you come to?

Festina lente — hasten slowly. Whatever we do with this Lent we must remember not to rush into grand gestures that collapse by the Second Sunday, leaving us discouraged. Our penances must be costly but not unrealistic. For some of us there will be quite enough crosses already and Lent will be about how we carry them, how we persevere, more than anything else.

Come Holy Saturday the light will shine in the darkness and the whole point of anything in Lent is that when he steps out of the tomb we might recognise him that little bit more.

The sermon preached at the Mass of Baptism, Reception and Confirmation on Saturday. The readings were 1 Kings 3:4–13 and Mark 6:30–34.

If this is your first time in a Catholic Church, you are very welcome! And even if it’s not, this may be the first time you have ever heard that first passage of scripture that we’ve just read. And if it is your first time hearing that prayer of King Solomon, you’d be forgiven if you didn’t quite follow it. Because our first reading — taken out of context as it seems to be — appears to be saying something we do not believe at all, and it’s easy to see why the Christian faith is so often misunderstood.

Solomon is only the third king of Israel, famous for his wisdom, and this reading is his “origin story.” This is the story of where that wisdom came from. Solomon is speaking to God about his father, the famous King David. And Solomon says to the Lord: “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant David my father, because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart towards you.”

In other words, Solomon says to God: “You loved my father because he was good and he deserved it.” That’s the problem with taking things out of context, because if you were to flick back a few pages in your Bible and read the story of David, you will see that that’s only half true. David’s life is a constant story of: God does something for David; David forgets that and then does something bad; God tells David off; David repents and is forgiven; and then the whole cycle starts again. One of David’s most famous prayers is the Psalm that he wrote begging for mercy, after he’d had an affair with another man’s wife, and then murdered the man to try to cover up his sin. David is not a perfect person. The point is: God did not love David because David was good. David became good (eventually!) because God first loved him. It was that constant love and mercy and forgiveness that God showed to David that changed him.

And that can be hard to grasp. It is somewhat difficult to understand what it means for God to love all of us in that same way; to understand his mercy and forgiveness, to imagine what that kind of compassion looks like in God. We can’t get “inside” his mind to understand his feelings or emotions, because in himself, God is not like us.

But so that we can begin to understand him, so that he can become even more approachable to us, God becomes one of us.

And it’s exactly that same kind of love and compassion that we see in action in our Gospel reading. The Apostles have just returned from their first solo preaching mission. They must have been exhausted from all of the walking — never mind all the people they had been helping, preaching to, healing, and working miracles for. Jesus himself had just heard that his cousin has been arrested and executed, so he must have been tired and emotional as well. But so many people have now heard about all the extraordinary things happening that they won’t leave Jesus — or even his disciples — alone, so that they don’t have time to eat, to sleep and to rest.

So first, Christ has compassion on his disciples: he tries to give them a break. They get into a boat to go somewhere quiet; they hope that no one will find them, so that at least for a few hours they can rest and recover. And there’s something quite comical in the crowd’s reaction: the way that you can imagine someone saying, “I know where they’re going,” and a mad chase takes place of everyone following them and in fact getting there before them. It’s not written down, but you can imagine that the disciples groaned as the boat reached the land, and they said, “What are these people doing here? I thought we were finally going to have a chance to eat something!”

They get out of the boat. And no matter what they’re feeling, Christ now has compassion on the crowds as well. “When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

Not: “He loved them because they were all perfect already.” They needed him, and he felt sorry for them.

In fact that word we have here as “compassion” is one of the most fantastic words in the Bible, and “compassion” hardly does it real justice. He felt “gutted” for them. It’s not just an emotion of the head, but it describes almost a physical reaction to their need. When he saw how much they need him, it was like someone punched him in the stomach. That is the compassion, the love, that God feels for us.

And so he put aside the needs of his disciples, and even his own needs, and he sat down to teach them, even though he must have been physically and mentally exhausted.

This is the message of the Gospel: not that God loves those who are good, but that he holds back nothing to help those who need him. He helps them to find him, to know him, to be helped and healed and to be made good by his divine power.

For the first crowds, that was a process that began with a physical encounter. What we experience today in receiving the sacraments is the continuation of that same compassion. Here Christ doesn’t just teach us, but he gives himself to us unreservedly. He didn’t claim time or space for rest back then; he holds nothing back when he gives himself to us in Holy Communion. This Gospel illustrates to us that there is action on his part. He is not a passive or an unwilling participant in our encounter with him. He is moved by our need and he wants to give himself to us. Not because any of us is good or worthy, but because he sees how much we need him.