Sermon for 1 Lent

When was the last time you stood with your bare feet on the earth? Maybe you were standing in grass in a park or in your garden. Maybe you felt the fine grains of sand slip between your toes at the seaside. Perhaps youwalked out of the river, slipping and squidging through the mud to the bank.

On Ash Wednesday, if you received ashes, the priest would have said to you as she drew a cross on your forehead, ‘remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return’.

Biblical myth, like the stories of many cultures, holds that human beings were formed from the clay, from the earth itself — the Hebrew word Adamah meaning ground or earth, signifies human beings as literally earth-lings — creatures of soil and sand and mud.

There is something intimately grounding (there’s that word again) about standing barefoot on the earth, nothing between my body and the surface of the world. A reminder that I am part of it even as the minerals that carry oxygen through my blood and give function to my eyes and structure to my bones are part of me as wel — a reminder that I, along with every other human being walking the world’s surface, am miraculously enlivened soil — the humus out of which plants grow and through which life emerges. A reminder of the need for humility, a need for being grounded in what is and not what I would rather be the case.

It is the invitation of the Lenten season to slow down, lente in Italian and the language of music, and to attend to the real.

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The past two years have been a time of virtuality seeking, stretching, insterting itself, interposing itself with promises of connection amidst ongoing months of isolation.

And while we will all know from experience, the gifts of virtual connection in the form of endless Teams and Zoom and WhatsApp video calls has proven better than nothing at all, the absence of physical encounter has taken its toll.

Next term, students will be sitting prelims and finals in the Exam Schools, in person — for many of you it may be the first time you have actually sat live exams since GCSEs or indeed ever before. Things are, as they say, about to get real.

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Things are about to get real — why does this expression always seem to indicate something terrible, some impending hardship or difficulty?

Inevitably most of you will have been warned at some point in your time at Oxford, whether as a student or as a fellow for that matter, that some day you will have to go out into the real world, where things aren’t so lovely and work is so much harder. Not only do I suspect that people who say these kinds of things have no idea how hard the work at Oxford actually is, but also that they are mistaking their own experience for whatever it is that they mean by reality.

In my home country, it is common to hear political partisans refer to ‘the Real America’, which invariably refers to the parts of America that resemble their own homes, as opposed to the strange and decadent home cities and towns of other US citizens. The implication being that in ‘the Real America’, people know what real hardship is like and they face it bravely in a way that others could never understand.

Other times people will tell one another to ‘get real’ when they suspect that someone is living in a fantasy, a perception of the world disconnected from reality, a reality which is invariably grimmer and more uncomfortable than the delusion they are calling on one to reject.

We seem to have a deep suspicion that the world as it is conventionally perceived is somehow a self-comforting fantasy, and only a revelation of the terrible truth of reality will put us straight.

This seems to be the implication of the two men praying at the temple in Jesus’ parable — on the one hand a religious official and teach congratualtiong himself on his piety and holiness is found to be a hypocrite and on the other, a tax-collector, a collaborator with the occupying Roman government, accurately perceives his sinfulness, what later commentators would call his Total Depravity, and is so ‘saved’ from the temptations of fantasy.

Reality, we are told, is harsh, uncomfortable, and unforgiving.

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As many of you will know, between the last time I stood at this desk and tonight, I became a father.

It is traditional for new parents to go on (and on and on) about how becoming a parent changes you. Interspresed with laments for sleep that now seems like a fading memory of another life, one is supposed to discourse for long ages about how nobody who itn’t a parent can possibly understand the sublime suffering and beauty of parenthood.

There are any number of reasons why this is unhelpful, not least because there are many people who cannot or will not for reasons outside their control become parents though they may wish to, and there are innumerable others who have no desire to become parents, and yet manage to live fully realised human lives.

As a new parent, however, I can affirm that it has been for me a particularly revelatory experience, and one to which we all have some access, having been born at one time or another.

What being present at the birth of my son and my experiences in the first few weeks of parenthood have show me is a very particular encounter with the real.

Childbirth rests at the crossing of life and death, pain and joy. Having been present with Sorrel through her labour and into the arrival of Tobias, in and our of hospital and into the following days, I have seen something of reality, and it is not merely the pain and the perils of labour. It is also the joy of welcoming a new person and the mysterious way his unfocussed eyes begin to percieve the world.

Reality is complex and truly to see the world as it is requires seeing both the painful and the joyful, the perilous and the comforting, the possibility of death and the possibility of brand new life.

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The invitation of Lent to self-examination and to the encounter with the truth of ourselves is indeed an invitation to examine that about ourselves which we might rather not encounter, but it is not something that we ever do alone or apart from the truth that however we are and whoever we find ourselves to be, our self-examination and encounter with those places in ourselves which stand in need of healing is always conducted within the context of a God who has loved us into being and called her creation very good.

The call of Lent is the call to humility, to standing in the soil of the world, unmediated by our fantasies of tidiness that would have the world conform to our preferences and our fears.

Humility is the willingness to see ourselves as we are and also to admit that we are worthy of love. Reality is not full of sorrow. The revelation of the world as seen in and through the Crucified one is one filled with wonder and surprise, suffering and the experience of being fully known.