Electric Prayer

Welcome to Lent!!

The Gospel for Ash Wednesday neatly summarises the three pillars of Lent: fasting, prayer and almsgiving. When most people think of ‘giving things up for Lent’ they are thinking in terms of the disciplining of body and spirit, which comes under the broad category of ‘fasting’. So let’s leave fasting to one side and look at the other two: prayer and almsgiving.

Prayer

Everybody’s prayer life can do with polishing. One idea for Lent is not to treat prayers as separate strenuous exercises to be got through, but to work towards becoming saturated with God the way a sponge is saturated with water.

Here are some suggestions involving Universalis.

If you have the Universalis app and the spoken Hours subscription, make a resolution to wake up five minutes earlier than usual and press the Play button in the Spiritual Reading page. This gives the Second Reading from the day’s Office of Readings. The average reading takes 4½ minutes, so for that time, just lie back and listen with your eyes shut. Don’t worry about being attentive to every word. (I suppose I could add, don’t worry about dozing off.) As an encouraging commentary by St Ephraem said last Sunday, about noticing some bits of our reading but not others:

Be thankful for what you have received, and do not be saddened at all that such an abundance still remains. What you have received and attained is your present share, while what is left will be your heritage. So do not foolishly try to drain in one draught what cannot be consumed all at once, and do not cease out of faintheartedness from what you will be able to absorb as time goes on.

The Second Readings throughout Lent are well chosen: a treasury of spiritual nourishment.

If you want to lie in bed even longer, you can (with the right subscription) do the same with the Gospel of the day: lie back and listen. Actually there are two ways of doing it. You can use the Lectio Divina page to hear the Gospel and nothing but the Gospel, framed with an opening and closing prayer. Or you can use the Readings at Mass page and get extra encouragement by hearing the Old Testament reading which precedes the Gospel. (If you haven’t got the audio subscription, you can read the text on your screen; and if you haven’t got the app, the Readings at Mass page on our website will give you the text of the readings.)

These morning exercises are not meant to be study as such. Study is for other times of the day. Rather, they are a way of absorbing the atmosphere of our faith: the loving kindness of God, and our response to it. And as St Ephraem tells us, the Spirit will make sure that if one sentence, even one phrase, is the right food for your soul right now, you will hear it and receive it.

Almsgiving

In the Spiritual Reading page on Thursday, Pope St Leo the Great said about almsgiving:

The works of mercy are innumerable. Their very variety brings this advantage to those who are true Christians, that in the matter of almsgiving not only the rich and affluent but also those of average means and the poor are able to play their part. Those who are unequal in their capacity to give can be equal in the love within their hearts.

Just as fasting means more than just eating less food, so almsgiving covers more than just the rattle of coins in a collecting-box. Let me share some unsettling thoughts about it.

In the old days we used to light fires. We would rake out surplus ash, crumple newspaper, put thin sticks on it, one or two thicker ones, get some coal ready. We would strike a match, light the paper, and finally, after a longer or shorter struggle with flames and fuels, we would have a good fire burning and warming us.

Nowadays we turn a dial or press a button.

In the old days we were told to feed the hungry, give a home to the homeless, clothe the the naked and visit prisoners and the sick.

Nowadays we make a donation. We give coins to the collection or click a button on a screen.

The new way of warming our rooms is cleaner than the old. The new way of doing works of mercy is cleaner too. We never have to look at someone hungry, or a ragged stranger, or someone sick or in prison. We simply pay to have a certain number of units of fedness, welcomedness, clothedness or visitedness delivered where the experts say they are needed.

The advantages are many. Let me list them. I am safe. I don’t have to worry that I might be helping the wrong person, or the right person in the wrong way. I don’t have to lie awake at night because I fear that I’m not going to be able to deal with all the needs of someone I have started to help. What if the hungry man is going to run out of food again tomorrow, or the prisoner is going to be sucked, despite himself, into some life-ruining criminal conspiracy? I don’t have to care. Professionals will deal with it. That is what I am paying them for. I am safe.

Clean, safe and hygienic it all may be. But the Gospel does not say ‘I tell you solemnly, in so far as you paid someone else to do this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you paid someone else to do it for me.’ People are people, not units of neediness. ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ was said in a different context on a different subject, but it applies here as well. When people are desperate and their situation can only (it seems) get worse and worse, they lose humanity in their own eyes as well as everyone else’s. Making them victims of impersonal, efficient assistance does not restore that humanity. People need people, not machines.

Yes, of course sometimes donation and efficiency and organisation are the only way: think of an earthquake in some remote region, for example. And undoubtedly it is unsafe and disturbing of sleep to find myself helping someone, and then helping some more, and then having to help more still.

But then – where does it say that we are put on this earth to sleep well and be safe?

Schools

As so many of you know, Universalis is aimed at individuals. But from time to time someone in a school asks us about whole groups. They may be thinking about equipping all the teachers with Universalis, or even about giving it to every pupil in the class.

We are always happy to have this sort of conversation, so if you are involved with a school and are having ideas of this kind, do get in touch at universalis@universalis.com and let’s work out between us what can be done.

Thank you all for using Universalis. If you have trouble or questions, or suggestions, do write to us at universalis@universalis.com or use the Contact Us button in one of the apps.

Let us all keep one another in our prayers, as always.