Are you one of those people who likes to eat strawberries all year round? I’ve got to confess that I’m old-fashioned enough to feel there’s something not quite ‘right’ about it. Strawberries are such a summer fruit for me, associated with warmth and long sunny afternoons, that I can even persuade myself they never taste as nice, eaten at any other time of year.
No doubt it’s a huge achievement of modern civilization, that we can either grow or import fruit and vegetables out of season. It seems to represent complete human mastery of nature. We have learned how to bend creation to our own will, and make it serve our whims. But I wonder: is it actually good for us? How healthy is it, really?
One of the dangers is, that it’s a kind of confidence trick, making us believe that we really are lords of creation. And of course this is an illusion, as the recent heavy snow taught us. People seemed to be surprised to find a few inches of snow stopped them from carrying on their lives as normal. As usual, there was a lot of looking around for someone to blame - I even did some of that myself. But perhaps it’s good to be reminded that, after all, we cannot control every detail of our lives, especially when it comes to the environment we did not create. Most of the people of the world, who don’t live in the wealthy developed countries, know only too well what it is like to be unable to control the forces of nature, as we have seen tragically in the recent earthquake in Haiti, and many other natural disasters.
How, then, can we promote mental and emotional health in the ways we relate to our environment? The traditional wisdom of earlier generations used to emphasize the importance of marking the seasons, and living in harmony with them. Nature has rhythms of birth and death, growth and fruiting and diminishing, flowing and ebbing. Perhaps our lives will be better, if we go with the flow of the seasons, instead of trying to resist it? There are many voices within the environmental movement which encourage us to do just this, by eating locally produced, seasonal fruit and vegetables, rather than food that comes with lots of ‘air miles’.
The Church echoes this traditional wisdom by its use of liturgical seasons in its life and worship. Christmas comes at the darkest, coldest time of the year. It doesn’t matter whether Jesus was actually born on December 25th - we simply don’t know the date. It was the wisdom of the Church to celebrate the birth of the Son of God who brings life and light to all, just at the time when all of nature tells of our need for this. Easter, the day of resurrection to new life, is celebrated in the springtime. Here we have evidence that Jesus did indeed die, and was raised to life, just at this time of the Jewish Passover. But in God’s plan it is no accident that this happened at a time of year when the natural seasons symbolically reinforce the message that God brings new life from the dead.
February, as usual, includes the beginning of the season of Lent. This is a part of the rhythm we can bring to how we live, an alternating of feasting and fasting. Easter is the greatest feast of all, and to enjoy it to the full, we need to keep a time of fasting beforehand. And before that fasting, it was common to celebrate Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday: a feast of enjoying rich foods that you would not be using again until Easter came. These disciplines of eating or abstaining are not just about a physical detox - though that can be of immense value for many of us, in a day when we are constantly told that obesity is one of the greatest health problems facing the nation. They also encourage us to undergo a kind of spiritual detox, in which we take stock of our lives to see if there are habits of thought, behaviour, attitudes, speech or spending, that we ought to let go of.
How do we spend our leisure time? How do we spend, or earn, our money? How do we treat the people in our lives: our partners, family, or colleagues? How do we plan to vote, and why? How do we use the world’s resources at our disposal? All of these are questions that Lent invites us to ask, as we avail ourselves once again of this seasonal opportunity to go with the flow of what God has designed us to be.
Published in the Marston Times, February 2010