RELIGIOUS traditions mark out time with a pattern of fast and festival which gives meaning and shape to human life. In many of them, the Christian tradition particularly, that pattern gives us a grounding in a larger story, enabling us to glimpse and perhaps grasp a coherence underlying the apparently random and accidental sequence of our lives.

The Christian story, focused so intently on Jesus Christ, is itself cradled in a story which in the Bible begins with the God who brings into being the created order, the Universe we inhabit and of human life within it as the personal in that world. It follows the story of a people chosen and shaped to be the people of God. The story of that people is the very human story of oppression and violence, of grace and salvation. It is a story of exodus and exile and return.

At the heart of that story there is a longing for deliverance and redemption, for a definitive action of God at the very heart of our human condition. The Christian Church was born out of the conviction that in Jesus Christ, God had so acted. In a total entering into our human condition in the self-emptying of love, God knew from the inside our frailty, the consequences of our disordered desires, the flawed and fallen world in which we live. He became obedient, as St Paul says, “ even to death on a Cross”, the harsh reality that confronts us in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ. A love “so amazing, so divine” searches, tries and challenges who and what we are as those made in the image of that love.

Lent, which began last week on Ash Wednesday, draws us deeply into that story, culminating in Good Friday and Easter. The very word Lent is linked with the lengthening of the days as spring comes and new life breaks from the ground in a deliverance from the barren, dark imprisonment of winter. So Lent is to be a spiritual spring time, the enabling of new life by entering more deeply into the love of God in Christ. Historically, Lent was a time when candidates were prepared for baptism at Easter and a time also when penitents undertook spiritual exercises so that they might be restored again to the Church at the Easter baptism.

If this spiritual spring time is to be a reality we need first to take stock, to pause where we are and to examine ourselves. Knowing ourselves is not something unique to Christians; it has been recognised as wisdom for living by many down the ages.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the importance of learning the art of reflection. Alexander Pope wrote of our human condition as “chaos of thought and passion, all confused . . . the glory, jest and riddle of the world”. Each one of us knows in our own particular way something of the “chaos of thought and passion” but no less “the glory, jest and riddle”.

Each one of us is acquainted in one way or another with what Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things”, and each of us knows our need of the God who calls us when our life fails us and who is at the very source of our knowing and our loving. The Christian Gospel is that we can truly know ourselves only when we know ourselves in the light of Christ, for at the end we are to be examined by and in His love.

In old manuals for confession there were lists of sins to help us in our self-examination. I remember being given one as a boy which included “dangerous dances” (the mind boggled) and “making innuendoes” (which I thought might be some kind of wicked carpentry). Such lists have their uses and even more their limitations.

The Gospels, with their powerful stories of the encounter of Jesus with a whole variety of people — financial fraudsters, prostitutes, the crazed possessed by many demons, enthusiastic or uncomprehending disciples — can provide a starting point for our self-examination, as we try to place ourselves in those stories and find ourselves challenged, and humbled, and forgiven. And no less the fruits of the Spirit of which St Paul speaks — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control — how deeply, how completely are our lives and our relationships marked by these?

As we see ourselves in this light, the divine light, we know that we need both “time for amendment of life and the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit”. Lent gives us both this time and this grace.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe