WE may be seeing the first signs of spring — snowdrops and catkins — but the leaden skies and dank days of February can depress the spirits.

In terms of headlines this month began with questions of prurience and privacy about those competing for political leadership. Hard on the heels of this discussion came the protests in the Islamic world sparked by the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Alongside issues of prurience and privacy have been concerns about freedom and religion, about culture, reverence and respect on the one hand, and the right of free comment, mockery, satire and caricature on the other.

It is worth noting that in late 19th-century England the secularist magazine, The Freethinker, published a series of comic biblical sketches and blasphemous Bible cartoons, crudely caricaturing God and Jesus but in a virulently anti-Semitic way that would nowadays not be tolerated. We may no longer live in a culture of deference, but there are still serious questions to be raised about a culture of brash assertiveness insensitive to the virtues of reverence and courtesy.

These questions are well worth pondering as we stand on the verge of Lent, which begins next week on Ash Wednesday. The 40 days of Lent leading up to Holy Week and Easter were originally days of penitence in preparation for the great baptism celebrated on Easter night, the night of the Lord’s passover from death to life, the moment when the new creation dawned.

Later, to this preparation for baptism was joined a time of penitence for those whose sins had cut them off from the source of life and grace. The way of repentance was the way of renewal, and Lent — the Old English word means “springtime”, the time when the days begin to lengthen as green shoots push their way through the seemingly dead soil of winter — was the springtime of the soul.

Lent summons us to take stock, to a penitence and contrition which demand our self-examination in the light of Christ. In the early Church public penitence became all too easily an occasion for scandal and gossip, so, wisely, the penitence that was rightly required in acknowledging sin and failure became properly private. Penitence was quite rightly not something to be placarded publicly, but needed to be expressed in the security and confidentiality made possible by wise spiritual guides and counsellors.

The confidentiality rightly required of contemporary counsellors was anticipated long before in the seal of the confessional, and doctors of the soul are rightly those who minister God’s grace, healing and forgiveness, through their own receiving of that forgiveness and the knowledge of divine wisdom.

The brash assumptions that all have “the right to know”, and that everything can be published “in the public interest” damage not just those whose personal privacy is violated but also all of us tainted by an insatiable appetite for prurient tittle-tattle. It was Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, who wisely (and perhaps surprisingly) wrote at the time of the Wolfenden report on homosexuality in 1957 that there was “a realm which is not the law’s business, a sacred area of privacy where people make their choices and decisions, fashion their characters; asserting their own rights and liberties into which the law generally speaking must not intrude”.

We could say that Fisher’s comment was a wise example of the outworking of courtesy — an old-fashioned virtue which no society sensitive to human flourishing can afford to despise. It was a virtue championed by that remarkable 14th-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, who wrote that God himself was “very courtesy” who in that courtesy brings us to the knowledge of our sin by the light of his mercy.

It is that courtesy which is rooted in respect for and sensitivity towards each other that tempers the assertion of rights to freedom and comment. A series of crude cartoons serves little to enable courtesy. We would do well to remember, in an age when easy speeches are made equating religion with violent, assertive fanaticism, that the two great and essential commandments that Jesus taught his disciples were the love of God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and the love of our neighbour as ourselves.

If we are to love in such a way we need the grace of that courteous God who sustains and keeps us, pouring the very life of His Spirit into our hearts that we may bring forth the fruits of the spirit, which are, in St Paul’s words: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. To grow in these graces is a challenge not just for Lent but for a lifetime.

The Right Rev Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe