Refreshment Sunday?

Clergy - and I include myself - have long bewailed the fact that in the UK, the traditional Mothering Sunday has been overcome by ‘Mothers’ Day’, with all its kitsch commercialism. Actually, I think that more serious than this is the way we have ignored the spiritual and liturgical dimension of this Sunday in the middle of Lent as ‘Refreshment  Sunday’.

Perhaps few of us have been sufficiently austere or abstemious to deserve a day off. Nevertheless, in a deeper sense, we do all require refreshment in our lives. So often, our desire to follow Christ and to live appropriate lives has become burdensome and unrewarding. Prayer in particular becomes a struggle, or a barren duty; worship an activity we participate in rather than look forward to.

Our Christian life has become a desert, a wilderness. Our souls are thirsty and in danger of fading. The greater danger is that we do not even recognise our plight or our need. If Lent has a real value, it is that we may become more aware of our state, and may look for a way out of the dry land – not by indulging our superficial hungers and thirsts, but by longing to be able to cry out with the Psalmist:

                You are my God; earnestly I seek you.

                I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,

                in a dry and parched land where there is no water.   (Psalm 63:1)

The point of abstaining from some favourite food or drink is that our sense of lack may open us up to the more serious lack within. In his hunger in the wilderness, Jesus was able to see more clearly the truth of the words which expressed the Israelites’ experience when God fed them with manna, to demonstrate that ‘people do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deuteronomy 8:3.)

That is why sin is so often manifested in yielding to temptation to unbalanced consumption – of food and drink, in sexual activity or desire for possessions or power. We miss or ignore our real hunger for God, and pursue shallow and ultimately unsatisfying alternatives.

Augustine of Hippo came – reluctantly at first - to a realisation of the emptiness of self-indulgence and could pray:

   Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.

Peter spoke to the onlookers in the Temple who were amazed at the healing of the paralysed man, and encouraged them to ‘turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord ‘(Acts 3:19.)  The rich and self-righteous are often warned by Jesus and by his followers that their satisfaction at their supposed material or spiritual wealth is a snare and delusion, which can insulate them against the gracious offer of the Lord.

Exploring the message of Refreshment Sunday – having already denied ourselves some physical pleasure - may help us to rediscover our huger and our need for God. Rowan Williams somewhere suggests that calling to God as Father is not a calm assertion of a universal truth, but more like a needful child’s cry for help. The younger son’s experience of famine led him to discover – and experience for the first time - his father’s true love for him.

At the very least, mid-Lent Sunday offers an opportunity to begin again with our observance of Lent, or to make a more serious commitment to make space, to allow God a chance to satisfy our deepest needs.