Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Ash Wednesday - March 2, 2022
In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.
You only are immortal, the creator and maker of [hu]mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song. (BCP, 499)
So goes the commendation of the body in the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer.
Today marks the beginning of another Lenten journey through the desert. Today we undergo a kind of burial, marked with ashes as a reminder of our mortality. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Remember.
Memory, as we all know, is capricious and unreliable. We remember only in part—usually the part that most affected us emotionally—and our minds fill in the details of the past in ways that often confirm whatever biases we already have firmly in place. And often, we remember what we wish—or fear—were true.
We might call this phenomenon denial. As the saying goes, it ain’t just a river in Egypt. Nor is a bad thing, really. Denial is a gift that allows us to set aside painful truths, memories, or events that we are not strong enough to look in the eyes just yet.
Then, of course, there are all the truths we know intellectually but that have still not sunk down into our hearts. Like the truth of our mortality or of our need for God’s goodness and grace or of the overflowing abundance of God’s love for us. These are some of the truths this season asks us to recall in order that we might return to God and live. I’m sure there are other truths yet more personal that await our invitation to plant themselves in the soil of our hearts.
In the last year, I have had the privilege of accompanying someone through a rare and usually terminal cancer. For months, she was sharply aware of her mortality, and it seemed likely that she would die this year. Having had surgery, she now has a good prognosis, but she can’t unsee the possibility of her death. I recently said to her, “You have looked death in the face, and now you know it is not a question if you are going to die; it’s a question of when you are going to die. And that has to change how you live the rest of your life, whether it is one more day or twenty more years. Your denial of death is over, and that has changed everything.”
The truth is perhaps a bit subtler and more complex for most of us. We all accommodate ourselves to the daily getting on with things. We adapt, survive, and learn to forget the pain, or at least to live with it more or less companionably. Our own collective forgetting is largely responsible for the political, ecological, epidemiological, and economic disasters that have been piling on for the last several years. But today, and this season, call on us to remember.
The remembrance to which we are called is a full body and full-hearted experience. This remembrance is not the reading of pious books that fill our minds with nice ideas about God. It isn’t fasting from chocolate so we can fit into our skinny jeans again. Remembrance of the kind that Lent invites us into is the drawing together of all the shards of ourselves, all the fragments we have flung into the corners of our lives so that we can come to greater wholeness and integrity in God. So that, in that beautiful image from Jeremiah, our hearts can turn from stone to flesh.
This process can be a painful one, but it isn’t one we have to go through alone. Several years ago, I was in a process of deeper healing in my relationship with my father. We’d come a long way, but there were some painful memories that just wouldn’t let go. One morning, as I was praying, without knowing where the question came from, I asked God to show me what had happened. I saw the scene unfolding in front of me. Only this time, I was watching events unfold from God’s perspective, and I felt God’s love so powerfully, both for myself and for my father. A part of that love was the tearing of God’s heart, and the pain of silent, loving witness. God didn’t intervene. God didn’t stop me or my father from being hurt. God stood there, loving us both beyond loving, witnessing to the totality of that moment, which was so much more than the events taking place.
That moment of prayer was powerfully healing. God remembered me, and my father, and every detail of that moment. God held us all together, all the broken, sharp-edged parts of us. God fitted together the fragments and made whole what once had been broken.
Perhaps this Lent, we’re called to learn to witness as God witnesses. Witnessing requires patience. It requires attention. It requires us to stand there, feeling powerless, allowing our hearts to break open at the pain or the beauty of another’s life—or our own—so that we can learn to love as God loves.
We all know there is more than enough to witness these days: the shattering of world order, the atrocity of war in Ukraine, the unmooring of our lives in the recent pandemic, and surrounding it all the continued and accelerating collapse of the climate, all in addition to whatever smaller but no less important moments fill our daily lives. In this witnessing is a kind of martyrdom—a laying down of our lives as a testimony to the power of God’s love and God’s life to make all things whole and new again in Christ.
If it is true, as I told my friend with cancer, that having looked into the face of death, we can no longer live in denial of our mortality, it is also true that having known life, we can no longer fully deny its reality. Christ died once, for all. And each of us in this room has heard, in our various ways, Christ’s calling in our hearts, drawing us on to seek the life that really is life. We have all responded, however imperfectly, to that call, or we wouldn’t be here today. Just as we cannot fully ignore the reality of death, however much we try, we cannot fully ignore or forget the reality of Christ’s resurrection. Today we are called most especially to remember our redemption in Christ.
As the burial rite hovers in the background of today’s liturgy, so, too, does the baptismal rite buoy us from below. The mark of the ashes on our foreheads sits on the same spot where, however many years ago, we were sealed with chrism and the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever. Buried with Christ in his death, so that we might be raised with him in his resurrection.
We needn’t fear the darkness of the Day of the Lord of which the prophet Joel reminds us. For while it is the darkness of the tomb, it is at the same time, the darkness of the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters at the Creation, and it is the blinding light of Christ’s coming in glory.
And so, even at the grave—and yes, even in Lent—we make our song.
