Here we meet again, at the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday. Every year I
come to this day thinking, “Already?” and then when Holy Week comes, I always
feel I haven’t gotten it quite right–I haven’t done it quite as well as I intended.
I’m a teacher, so I often spend my workday in that land where right answers can
be bit wrong and wrong answers are somehow a little right. Just yesterday, I
defined the word “sacrosanct” as “sacred” for my fifth grade class. Jelani called
out “the Sacred Scripture!” and Jayson rejoined, “WHAAAT?” to which Jelani
replied,”the Bible!” and Jayson sneered, “The Bible ain’t sacred. Everybody
knows what’s in it!”
Well, everybody doesn’t. I know I’ll cycle once again through the familiar (yet
secret!) readings, like the fig tree, hoping that this will be the year during which
these readings will bear fruit for me. It’s a lifelong process: we empty ourselves
out each lent, we listen for God in the silence, we eschew what are for us the
everyday comforts in order to learn something new, to reach new understanding.
As I approach the final decades of my life, I am learning to be more present to
the questions that will never in my life be finally resolved.
It’s a vexed season: we encounter each other with ashes marking our foreheads
as we head off to our offices and classrooms, with the words echoing in our ears
“Beware of practicing your piety before others, in order to be seen by them!” and
“Rend your hearts, but not your clothing!” It’s just not possible to split the
difference between keeping your praying between you and God and wearing the
mark of piety and observance on your forehead as you shop at the Jewel and
wait for the El.
But just because this is an impossible conundrum doesn’t erase our obligation to
make it work. We compartmentalize: our hearts may be rent, but are not entirely
broken open. We live in a time and place where we see in real time the despair
and need in places like Haiti, yet we can still shop for replacement windows in
our own houses, or spend a few dollars on specialty coffees for ourselves. We,
who have so much, are not ashamed to acquire more. And where is the justice in
that? And what are we to do with the dissonance between our lives and the lives
of so many others?
Lent is a spare season, one for simplicity and silence. Not the hushed and
expectant silence of Advent, with its many symbols and rituals, but rather a bare
windy plain of a season, each one of us standing in the middle of our personal
deserts, with 360 degrees worth of vision to the horizons of our lives. And we
invite God, invite the stories of the season, invite the practices of prayer, of
fasting, of almsgiving to teach us how to fill up the space with lives worthy of our
heritage. How to employ our goods and our energy in God’s service. How to
appreciate and to sanctify our own particular realities and situations.
None of these things comes easily, without choices and challenges. In God’s
Dominion, very little occurs in a linear kind of way. Our lives are fraught with
sorrows amid the joys. Parents of teens and young adults recall with ruth those
days when you could fill your infant with unspeakable joy just by walking into a
room. And that baby becomes a young adult with all the challenges and choices
and events, some of which bring no one any joy We in this parish have even
walked with brothers and sisters who have endured the terrible illnesses and
deaths of children. Joy becomes sorrow, and they coexist, the joy we once knew
never really goes away.
How do we walk through Lent knowing the terrible unfairness of life? How do we
cope with the dissonance between our reality and reality of those who walk the
world in our time, on our hemisphere, in our town? We know that baptism does
not inure us against pain and suffering, but it does give us grace to grow through
these trials. To avoid the sins that are so explicitly in our paths–consumerism,
self-absorption, blindness to the needs and realities of others. To discern the light
that shines through the broken places.
Lent comes at a time when the storehouses filled with last autumn’s harvests are
just about empty. In rural cultures, fasting during this season is a pragmatic, and
perhaps necessary, act. Yet, if you or I fast this lent, we know that we are
choosing hunger. What does that mean when in much of the world, hunger is no
choice, but a baseline condition of life? How can we look at that, find meaning
and grace in the knowledge?
As we anoint one another this night, we pray for one another, and we pray for the
grace to understand and learn from our challenges. We pray for generosity of
spirit, for the ability to give and accept gifts of time and treasure from each other.
We pray for a spirit of appreciation for the physical and spiritual foods that are
ours.
As the days lengthen through the course of these 40 days, help us turn our faces
to Your light, and bask in the warmth of Your community. Amen.
Julie Drew
Ash Wednesday, 2010
March 6, 2010
September 17, 2009
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