Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
For the past month, the last line of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day” has taken up residence in my mind. She wrote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Exploring this question is a good practice for today and for the whole of Lent. Lent can get overly focused on our past, the life we have already lived. But what if Lent is really about the life yet to be lived? What if we gave as much attention to where we are going as we do to where we have been?
What does it mean to live our one wild and precious life? What are the things that domesticate and devalue our life? How do we recognize and recover what is of ultimate value and importance? Maybe our greatest sins are the ones in which we tame and impoverish our lives and the lives of others.
When I describe life as wild, I’m talking about being open to what we can neither control nor predict, being able to receive whatever comes to us. I’m talking about not letting the past define or domesticate us, not letting the present moment cage us but rather exposing ourselves to the risk of an unknown future, the possibility of something new. We often let fear, self-doubt, guilt, regrets, disappointments, or wounds confine and tame our life. Every time we try to control life, guarantee outcomes, or live within the boundaries of what is safe and predictable, we limit our life. We live less than who we are and want to be. Consider what you need to do or give up, to reclaim your wild life? What cages imprison you?
What makes our life precious is not what we have, or how much we have. It’s not dependent on how others see us. The preciousness of life is found in its fragility and mortality. Life is short and uncertain, and we only have one. There are no guarantees. The future is unforeseeable. Rather than this negating the value and beauty of life; it intensifies it. Everything and everyone matters. Nothing and no one are to be taken for granted. Not a minute is to be wasted. This intensification of life gets revealed in the things we are most passionate about; in the people we love, in the things that give us meaning, offer us hope, and give us courage. The preciousness of life underlies the truth that we are of infinite value. Maybe this Lent we wrestle with how to divest ourselves of everything that diminishes our value and keeps us from remembering and reclaiming our treasures.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Those words are not a threat of death or a judgment that we are bad or worthless. To hear those words and remember our mortality is the first step in healing the ways our lives become distorted. Whether it’s fear, arrogance, pride, delusion, denial, or pain, we forget that we are dust. Having forgotten our own mortality, we have no need for the immortality of God, offered us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we forget our mortality, our human nature, we begin practicing our piety, before others; hoping to be seen and praised. We trade the secret rewards of the Father for the public opinions of others. The question behind today’s ashes is not whether we will die, but how we want to live from this day forward.
We live in the tension between the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. The reminders of our mortality and the fragility of life all are around us. We work hard at denying, ignoring, and forgetting those twin realities. We’re reminded of it by aging and illness. Accidents, mass shootings, wars, hurricanes, and floods remind us of how easily and quickly life can change. Our own cemetery and columbarium stand as monuments to our mortality.
Our lives and treasures exist in the midst of the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death. As much as we might want to escape those two realities, we cannot. We mark ourselves with the ashes of mortality not to make us cynical and hopeless, but to return us to our self and proclaim that everything matters, freeing us to live a different way, so that we can remember and reclaim our treasures, the things in our lives that are of ultimate importance and value.
It’s easy to forget our treasures, to take them for granted, or just set them aside, making us forgetful of what really matters. As we reclaim them we’re more whole, not just for ourselves but so we can offer our treasure back to God and others. They are the treasures that “neither moth nor rust consumes” and “thieves do not break in and steal.” For where our treasure is, there will our heart be also. (Matt. 6:21). +Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment