Welcome to The Joy of Forgetting Oneself, the second episode of our Lent 2025 podcast series ‘The Joys of Lent.’

Do you struggle to stay present? In this second episode, our principal, Alan Gregory, reflects on Lent as a time not as rigid self-denial but as a chance to truly engage with life.

With humour (including a story about spending Ash Wednesday in a Texas courtroom), personal tales, and hard-hitting observations, he explores distraction, attentiveness, and the beauty of noticing nature and the people around us. 

Alan also shares three simple Lent exercises to help you live more fully this season. 

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Cats understand Lent.

Sophie stretches herself along the back of the sofa,

her paws kneading the soft cushion.

She ripples with joy. Close by,

I am trying to celebrate Lent in my way,

sat on a hard chair.

My fingers are between the covers of a book

and I fumble awkwardly to mark this section

and that, negotiating the text

of morning prayer for Ash Wednesday.

My mind wanders about. I have said whole Psalms.

without realising it,

the chair is uncomfortable. Only,

I know this is good

because as everybody says, discomfort is

so close to godliness,

only one notch down from being clean.

Not the Sophie minds cleanliness.

She knows the exact lay of her fur, feels instantly

every tiny momentary displacement. By contrast,

I catch myself in a mirror,

and I'm surprised. My body is a stranger.

I occasionally catch up with. Its changes

shout out the alarming news.

Cats understand Lent. I however, do not.

Once I spent Ash Wednesday in a Texan traffic court,

I made my excuses.

I appealed for an unlikely mercy.

Your Honour, I said it was not my intention to break the law.

My foot, your Honour, sir, occasionally takes leave

of my senses, and presses too hard upon the accelerator.

I was late, Sir, I hope you'll bear in mind, my Lord,

your worshipfulness for a church appointment, which is why

as I hope you've noticed, I'm wearing this clerical collar.

Your grandness, my anxiety overtook me shortly

before the policeman.

I did not mean to speed. I was simply inattentive.

Sophie is never inattentive.

Her pores do not run away with her. Even asleep,

she watches every movement in this room.

She notices, she attends. Staring through the window,

now, that electric tremble in her eye picks up distant

movements, flickering instance, potential prey,

the shifting leaf in the yard.

Cats understand

Lent. Instructions for making a kite.

Making and flying a kite is not for the careless.

It will require all your concentration.

You must give it time. Freedom from distraction is not easy.

It takes some practise.

Run your fingers along the wood from which you will make the

frame for your kite.

Notice any variations. Test the string in your hands.

Admire the colours of your kite.

Imagine them against different kinds of sky.

Think of your kite against the sun,

black as an eclipsing moon.

Anticipate the tension of the wind upon the string.

Relax your body but hold your hands in readiness.

Focus your mind. Now, make your kite.

The boy looked puzzled.

He felt around in the box for more instructions.

I really wanted, he thought, to know what to do with the wood

and the string and stuff.

He turned the instructions over.

There was a note on the back.

You may be wondering what to do with the wood

and the string and stuff.

If you follow the instructions over in the leaf,

however, you will undoubtedly work it out for yourself.

How many are your work,

So Lord, in wisdom, you made them all the earth

and the sea are full of your creatures.

Vast and spacious, teeming with beings

beyond number, living things, both large and small.

The Old Testament delights in the abundance of creation.

In the provision of living things God has not stinted,

they are beyond number.

Everywhere we look, there is life growing, crawling,

running, jumping, flying.

In the ancient world, a person

who could name many things was counted wise.

So in the Book of Job, for instance,

there are passages in which the author proves

that he's rich in the knowledge of names.

That he has at his fingertips

the lists of trees and plants, precious metals and stones,

and animals and fish.

So he builds up an inventory of the variety of creation.

He writes registers of wonder, wonder at the countlessness

of created things, wonder at creation's fullness.

It's busy multiplicity. God wants you to enjoy this.

So stand outside your home

and let your senses have their fill.

Breeze, movement, subtleties of touch, smell,

distant sounds.

Take in from all sides this blessed assault.

Free your attention from its small and habitual bounds.

Let your senses live, for their capacity is large

and requires exercise.

Attend and the world is enlarged.

It exhausts grasping. Life, beckoning round

endless corners, giving, naming an excess,

an embarrassment of riches.

How many are your work,

so Lord? Here is an exercise for Lent.

Go where you can see, hear, feel, smell,

and perhaps even taste a multitude of creatures.

It is not good, says God,

For human beings to be alone. People

are mysterious.

There is an irreducible otherness about them.

I'm sorry if that sounds odd.

Perhaps I'm more self-absorbed than most, more stuck

in the snail shell.

So I need reminding, jogging await.

There are moments, a glance, a squeeze of the hand,

an unmistakable laugh, an accent, a turn of phrase, a shrug,

and I'm amazed, halted in surprise,

like the path has come out on a cliff edge.

Here is someone else, someone that is not me

and not some bit of my world either.

Another person with memories, thoughts, impressions,

desires, emotions, utterly her or his own.

All of which I am outside and always will be.

Always more mysterious than I can know.

You see, I normally think that I'm at the center,

and you are part of my life.

Jog me awake though with your smile or your frown,

and I'll find I'm part of your life.

That there are wills other than my own, mysterious wills, not

to be taken for granted.

This one and that one, far beyond any easy description.

Wills that shape my life in ways beyond number.

When I know this, when I awake to it, I cease to be alone.

I'm also a little scared.

Here then is a second Lenten exercise. This Lent,

choose someone you love or someone you don't.

And take liberties with your precious time.

Spend more time with him or her than you need to.

He had finished the kite.

It had not been easy to fix the sticks together.

To stretch the bright red

and blue material.

To knot the small balancing weights in the tail.

He'd been tempted to give up. It was such a nuisance.

The instructions had been right, making a kite,

took careful thought and all the concentration he had.

He left the house to walk to a nearby park.

There was a hill there. From the top of it

You could see the whole town. That was the place.

It was tricky carrying a kite almost as tall as he was.

He held it like a shield at an angle in front of him

and peered over the top.

He had to think very hard about where his feet were.

The walk to the park took five times longer than usual.

He stared straight ahead the whole time

and his arms ached.

Even now. The wind was tugging at the kite.

Finally, he arrived. He wanted to begin straight away.

He couldn't wait till he'd climbed the hill,

holding the kite above his head,

he started to

run. The Lord

God says, do not shut your ears to the cry of the needy.

I have seen men and women living in burnt out shacks

off a highway in St.

Louis. A woman half naked on a cold Newcastle evening

slapping her arms for warmth.

I have seen a young couple squeezing past the boards

nailed over an abandoned house,

looking for home. Children in a crack house,

cops slowly walking the driveway, guns drawn.

Mothers moving with their babies,

joking in the line to the food bank in Berwick.

I have seen teenagers selling themselves

among the tourists in a London street,

and a wild man shrieking at nothing while we all walked

warily, giving him space.

Down from the flats,

there are walkways too scary to use. The child

that the staff are too busy

to see dies in the emergency room.

A family I knew lived six months in a car.

I've seen all these things, which in itself is not unusual.

They disturbed me of course,

but it took a moment in the blaring Atlanta sun looking over

a bridge at children picking through refuse,

before I saw these miseries like a revelation,

I saw the destitution

and something inside me said, this is blasphemy.

Human beings made in God's image

should not have to live this way.

It is wrong. That was not a sophisticated insight.

It was not a politically

or an economically informed insight.

It was more fundamental, a plain moral fact.

Human beings should not have to suffer this.

God is affronted.

Our world echoes with the cry of the needy

and no amount of political

or economic reasoning can quite silence that

or argue it away.

Ever since this little revelation, I have had a

bad conscience.

Here then is a final Lenten exercise.

Seek out a place of need near your home

or place of work, any kind of human neediness.

Go there, pay attention, feel the woe,

and do something helpful.

Instructions for keeping Lent.

Keeping Lent is not for the careless.

You will not keep lent unless you pay attention.

Indeed, it will a great deal of attention.

You will not succeed by doing, seeing,

and feeling only what you habitually do,

see and feel. This will undoubtedly take some of your time.

Do not hesitate to give it.

Firstly, take a lesson from the cat and indulge your senses.

Allow them a good deal of room.

Then in addition, indulge your need of others.

Enjoy their strangeness. Wonder at it. Do not judge them.

Discover something new in those you love.

Something good in someone you don't.

Finally do not forget to let yourself feel pain.

Indulge your compassion.

It is a perfection of God within you.

The purpose of Lent is to prepare for Easter.

Lent gives us 40 days in which to forget ourselves

and discover life.

It is not long.

If we pay attention, though, by the end of Lent,

we will know why life's worth dying for.

By the end of Lent, we will have discovered

why a creation that teems with blooming buzzing life, is

so very good that it's worth giving everything to preserve.

If we really keep Lent, we will come

to share a little of God's eagerness for human life

and all life.

To know why life is so precious, so extraordinary,

we will know why God thought it worth dying for,

worth the gift of Jesus Christ.

If we take time during Lent, time to see, to taste,

to listen, to attend, to feel.

If we take time for this good creation, time

for one another, time for the needy.

And if in so doing we discover why life's worth forgetting

ourselves for the love of it,

then we will also be appropriately repentant.

We will grieve over our own lovelessness, our lack

of attention, our carelessness, destructiveness, our grumpy

clinging to ourselves and our small interests.

We will be sorry and so we will join the cry for life.

Then we shall be ready for Easter.

Ready for the resurrection of Jesus.

For the promise of God's glory over the face of the earth.

Ready for the God who proves faithful to all

who consider life worth dying for

He let go of the kite.

It rushed from his hands.

He didn't look up, holding tight to the spool of the string.

He ran on on up the hill as fast as he could.

He forced himself to the top,

the string unravelling all the way.

He got there and looked up. The kite dipped

and lifted above him.

Its tension trembling all down the string.

He turned, and the little patch of red

and blue curved over the town.

The wind numbed his ears, snatched his breath,

lifted his coat. He turned again and leaned into it.

The wind grasped everything.

String, kite, coat, hill, town,

one rushing life booming around him, catching him up.

Countless are your work

so Lord, all things look to thee.

When your breath comes upon them, they recover

and now give us new life

to the earth. During Lent,

give your senses, your hearts, your minds

some room to breathe, some space for the mystery of God.

In Lent, in God's name,

forget yourselves and live to excess.