What are you paying attention to? As Lent begins, it’s a good question to ask our selves. In some ways, it’s the only question, the goal of all of our Lenten observance. I might give up wine, or chocolate, or some other pleasure, for a time, so that I can learn to pay attention to it, rather than being controlled by it. I might give more to charity, or take up a good cause, so that I can pay more attention to my small place in a wide and intricate world. I might pay attention to my mother or my sister or a friend, while mortal attention is possible, as this is a time to remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

What I have been paying attention to lately is a painting in St Giles’ church, just up the road, by the Oxfordshire artist Roger Wagner: https://www.rogerwagner.co.uk/work/item/17/menorah-1993. Wagner’s painterly eye creates an eerie stillness in this scene, encouraging me to see both the large and the small: the iconic towers of Didcot power station, belching smoke into a serene blue sky, pleasing mirrored in the flooded fields in the foreground. And the tiny figures in that foreground, pitifully small and separate against both the dark satanic mills and the expanse of green and pleasant land. The artist has spoken of how, passing by on a train, he was struck by that Blakean duality: the towers are unmistakably reminiscent of a crematorium, spewing dust and ash, but in their fearful symmetry they also reminded him of a candelabra, or a menorah, which is what he has called this painting. And into this already unsettled and unsettling scene he has placed the crucifixion, Jesus and the thieves in miniature on their crosses. I find myself scanning the scene, over and over, willing myself to dwell on those deep, inviting reflections, or the soothing cobalt sky. And my eye passes again and again over the figure hanging on the cross, as I urge myself to see even as I turn away. And I find myself, again and again, in the people around the cross, huddled away in agony, hiding their eyes, or pointing and staring, looking without seeing. I wonder who I am among them, and I envy the little family on the left who are at least comforting one another as they look away.

The artist himself has said that the horrifying beauty he saw from that passing train made him think of Jesus’s death as the moment more than any other that links ‘the absence of God’ ‘with [God’s] presence’, ‘the tragedy of human life’ ‘with its redemption’. That connection, between life and death, love and the absence of all love, is deep and intimate, but it is neither easy nor comfortable. Roger Wagner can look on it with a painterly eye, but for most of us it takes the discipline of Lent before we are prepared to see it, to open our eyes to our own feebleness and failure and simultaneously to the love that embraces and restores us, in all of our weakness and all of our woe. In Lent we walk a winding path around our own temptations and desires, under and over our deep, intimate fears, a path that leads us, if our eyes are open, through those sodden fields and tempting reflections, and finally, with wondering steps and slow, to the still centre of the cross, and a God who looks on us with love we may, at last, have learned to bear.

As we begin our journey in dust, we could do worse than follow Adam and Eve out of the garden at the end of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; 
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

(John Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 641-9)