Thinking Anew:Next week Ash Wednesday will mark the beginning of Lent. How things have changed from the days when people would discuss in detail what they had given up as an expression of self-control and self-denial and various disciplines were undertaken in a surge of religious enthusiasm.
There may have been a certain amount of tokenism involved and an important principle trivialised as a result. Nonetheless, self-denial is still to be commended as an important dimension of life.
In a gospel reading appointed for Ash Wednesday Jesus warns against doing good things for the wrong reasons. He is critical of religious showmanship of all kinds. Prayer and acts of charity are private matters not to be paraded in public. Self-promotion disguised as self-denial is a constant temptation.
Self-denial has important social and moral benefits pointing us away from greed and self-indulgence to recognise the rights and needs of others. There are those who disagree and take a "stand alone" view of life, believing that it is a case of everyone for himself or herself, but this fails to take sufficient account of the fact we are social beings. Emile Brunner, sometime professor of theology in the University of Zurich, observed: "This is the biblical idea of man, that God, since he creates me as responsible, creates me in and for community with others. The isolated individual is an abstraction. . . I am not a man at all apart from others. . .
Robinson Crusoe's whole longing was to mingle once again with human beings in order to become a human being once again." We are interdependent beings trying to balance the desires of the individual with the requirements of the common good.
There is probably no other better illustration of this than the environmental crisis confronting us. The details were set out in the report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change launched in Paris on February 2nd, described by one journalist as "the day doubt died on the reality of global warming".
As far back as 1990 Pope John Paul II commented: "The most profound. . . indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life. Often the interests of production prevail over concern for the dignity of workers, while economic interests take priority over the good of individuals and entire peoples. In these cases. . .
environmental destruction is the result of an unnatural and reductionist vision which at times leads to a genuine contempt for man."
Despite such wise and well-informed cautions from scientists and religious leaders we seem unable or unwilling to face this reality. Changes in personal lifestyles are essential if we are to face up to what former vice-president Al Gore calls "an inconvenient truth", namely the destruction of life on our planet.
It may no longer be fashionable to ask people what they intend giving up for Lent but it is essential, given what we now know about the threat to the planet, to consider what we intend giving up for future generations. Denial must give way to self-denial. We must accept that we are not owners of the planet, merely caretakers, passing through. We owe this to our children, their children and their children's children.
"Ask the beasts and they will teach you; the birds of the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; the fish of the sea, they will inform you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Eternal has done this?" - Job 12:7ff,
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