On giving up sleep for Lent
At approximately 1.10pm on Monday 22nd March with a splendid yell, my son Aidan entered the world. It was an amazing moment, and one of those intense experiences which, though unique, brought back powerful and vivid memories of the births of my other two children. Life with young children has been exhilarating, exhausting, stimulating and challenging and has given me some of the richest, most intense experiences of God I have ever known. Having children has left no part of my life untouched – it affects everything, from the moment I wake up in the morning: how I drive (more defensively), the clothes I wear (baby sick is notoriously difficult to get out of clerical corduroy), and what I eat. It doesn’t seem too strong to talk about the experience as a kind of conversion.
Not much of my experience through this particular conversion has had much to do either with church or with spending long periods of time in silent contemplation. This is fortunate because small children (or mine anyway) aren’t especially given to enjoying long services in church, still less, spending time in austere contemplation.
One of the things which we are encouraged to think about in Lent is denying ourselves. We sometimes think about giving up chocolate or alcohol or other treats as a form of denial, but a more searching kind of denial is actually about giving up our control over what we do and who we think we are. This is called dispossession and profoundly challenges my ownership of my time, energy, and resources.
For me, having children has brought new insights to this experience. In one sense my children are highly dependent and need me in some pretty concrete ways to help them do even basic tasks. This kind of dependence forces me to abandon a picture of myself as an autonomous, self-possessed individual. At the same time my children are highly independent in many ways: they are not simply clones of me - we don’t think alike on many issues! - and they have their own priorities, friends, likes and dislikes. Their independence thus resists fiercely any possibility of me turning them into my possessions, of owning them.
Dispossession, at times, has been a painful process, as the truth that children bring, exposes my limitations, selfishness, and self-centredness. The surprise though, is how joyful much of this process is; a willing dispossession which, though not particularly voluntary, enlarges and enriches me, eliciting reserves of energy, patience and love that I didn’t know existed before. I am sure that God chooses many different ways to prise us away from our obsessive owning of things in order to learn to love, and being dispossessed by the presence of your children is but one. But my children have focused these experiences for me with a clarity and intensity I hadn’t known before.
There is still much I need to learn about being dispossessed by a God in whose service is perfect freedom, and the arrival of a new baby at the beginning of Lent seems a good time to do some more of that learning.
James
Grenfell
james.grenfell@stjohnsranmoor.org.uk