Avoiding the Truth

Great Lent, A Story about Avoiding the Truth, The Beginning of the End and Snow

Great Lent

Alexander Schmemann’s Great Lent: Journey to Pascha has revealed to me several truths that I was certainly avoiding because I simply did not want to acknowledge them. One of them concerns the pace at which I attempt to live: doing too much, moving too quickly, not taking enough time to focus on anything properly and, worst of all, this applying to make spiritual life as much as (perhaps more than!) it applies to anything else. I’ve written about this on here before which indicates to me that I have not learned.

Schmemann’s focus in one chapter is on “a Lenten style of life”. This involves many aspects, but one of them, which particularly struck me, was on creating a Lenten atmosphere in one’s home environment. He speaks, for example, about the way it has become simply normal to have background noise in the form of television of radio in our homes. But,

…this need for permanent music reveals the incapacity of modern man to enjoy silence, to understand it not as something negative, as a mere absence, but precisely as a presence and the condition for all real presence.

Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent, p.101

I don’t necessarily have the radio on all the time, but I do listen to podcasts pretty constantly. And I read books. It’s not the reading that's the problem though. It’s the way that I do it. I start too many books and end up feeling pressurised and stressed by it. I take on too much in an effort to master too much information, too many subjects all at once. As a result, my head is constantly filled with fragmented thoughts. This can often result in creativity and inspiration but, more often than not, it simply dulls my focus on any one particular topic.

This has crept up on me recently, as I have noticed that I have started (and not finished) a lot of books. Here they are:

Louis Markos - From Plato to Christ
Plato - Timeas and Critias
Alexander Schmemann - Great Lent
Mary Harrington - Progress Against Feminism
Jason Baxter - A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Comedy
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Helen Hanff - 84 Charing Cross Road
CS Lewis - The Silver Chair
M Scott Peck - The Road Less Travelled

For me, that is too many books to read at once and speaks more of some kind of intellectually totalitarian pathology than of a genuine desire in pursuing pleasure and knowledge.

Schmemann again:

Lent is…the recovery by man of his faith…it is also his recovery of life, of its divine meaning, of its sacred depth. It is by abstaining from food that we rediscover its sweetness and gratitude. It is by “slowing down” on music and entertainment, on conversation and superficial socializing, that we rediscover the ultimate value of human relationships, human work, human art. And we rediscover all this because very simply we rediscover God Himself - because we return to Him and in Him to all that which He gave us in His infinite love and mercy.

Ibid., p.105

Can I put this more positively? I would love to find a bit more space to abide in Christ’s word (John 8:31), to not feel so rushed but to find a stillness in God’s presence. I am trying.

A Story about Avoiding the Truth