Two things I ask of you;

do not deny them to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
give me neither poverty nor riches;
feed me with the food that I need,

or I shall be full, and deny you,
and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
or I shall be poor, and steal,
and profane the name of my God.

(Proverbs 30:7-9, NRSV)

Almost every day, I pass beggars in the street--several of them.  Old men, huddled up in blankets, young men staring vacantly, looking stoned, old women with kindly expressions.  When I first got to Edinburgh, this confused me.  I had always been taught to believe (or rather, had somehow assimilated the belief) that beggars are almost invariably cons and thieves, up to no good, merely pretending to be needy, so of course you shouldn’t let yourself be conned into giving to them.  But this didn’t make sense.  After all, wouldn’t this just be a way of saying that they had spiritual needs more than they had physical needs--if they really were cons, then they needed grace even more, so I’d better figure out how to give that grace.  And even more obviously, would someone who wasn’t genuinely needy really choose this lifestyle as their day job--sitting in a bundle of rags on dirty and damp street in the perpetual cold of Edinburgh? 

Lent is a time for the deliberate discipleship of our desires through refraining and focusing. Often this is portrayed as a somewhat arbitrary burden to be carried, as though the carrying of a burden were itself good. But fasting (or refraining from some regular activity) is not an end in itself, but a means to sharpen our hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God’s justice. Such disciplines as we accept for this period are not meritorious works of supererogation earning divine brownie points, nor do we seek out pain so as to enjoy the relief from it all the more at its end. We are, in Rowan Williams’ evocative phrase, setting out on “a journey into joy”. Lent is a time of preparation for the good news of Easter, but in the light of the cross and resurrection, we discover that the very disciplining of our desires is already good news, not merely preparation for it. The gospel does not add ethics as an appendix, the fine print of obedience you sign up for when you accept the gift of forgiveness. No, ethics is already good news. The disciplining of desire is also the liberation of desire; by learning self-control, we become free. We are learning to love rightly and so learning to be more human.