Beauty For Ashes

The reflection for the first Sunday of Lent will be posted on Thursday.

Ash Wednesday (Excerpts from Psalm 51)

…according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

…therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise. For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

           

Ash Wednesday sometimes creeps up on us quickly. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since we put away the Christmas decorations and suddenly it’s Lent and time to think about what we can do to prepare ourselves for the great celebration of Easter. It felt appropriate to reflect on Lent a couple of days before Ash Wednesday comes along so we can ponder on what it is that we want from our Lenten Season, a season that calls us to deepen our self awareness and draw closer to the heart of our God.

I chose certain excerpts from the Ash Wednesday psalm because they illustrate a crucial spiritual truth that is often overlooked by God’s people, especially in times such as Lent. The truth is that even though we may sincerely practice self denial, offer sacrifices and experience heartfelt moments of anguish over our sinfulness, we have absolutely no capacity to make ourselves worthy of the Father’s Love. What’s more, the Father knows that we are completely disabled and helpless when it comes to cleaning self up. When he tells us to come to him with weeping and fasting, he is not saying that before we come to him we have to make sure we are all clean and pure and that we have made ourselves spotless inside and out. What he is saying is, “Just come. Come with the awareness that you are small and I am the All in All. Come with the sorrow of knowing that you have tried in vain to accomplish things that only I can accomplish. Come with the knowledge that you have tried too hard, have cried too much, have crumbled under too many burdens, felt too lost for too long and still have made so little progress. Come with the understanding that looking on the Cross of my Son is not for your condemnation but is what should bring you tremendous relief because he has accomplished everything that you can never accomplish, especially when it comes to making yourself whole and worthy. Come because you are so loved, not because you are so good.” 

If we really approached Lent with true understanding and were able to fully receive its inherent gifts, we would rename it “The Season of Breathing.” Can you recall a time in your life when you were carrying a huge emotional burden of some sort and suddenly everything worked out beautifully? Can you remember the sense of being able to breathe freely and how it felt like you hadn’t been breathing for a very long time? If we understood fully the import of all that happened at the first Easter, we would become giddy with the freedom to breathe.

What really struck me about the Ash Wednesday psalm was that the one who was being expected to perform all the action was not the psalmist but the Lord himself. Listen:

…blot out my transgressions…Wash me from my iniquity … cleanse me from my sin… teach me wisdom…Purge me with hyssop… wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow… Create in me a clean heart… put a new and right spirit within me… Restore to me the joy of your salvation… sustain in me a willing spirit… open my lips…

Obviously, the psalmist understood something we often forget. The ball is in the Lord’s court. He is the source, the power and the action. When we try to wash, cleanse, teach, purge, create, restore, sustain or open ourselves in order to make ourselves acceptable to the Lord, we are leaving out the key part of our salvation: why Jesus died on the cross. We need to grasp, once and for all, that we cannot accomplish our own salvation. We are absolutely, totally and irrevocably incapable of healing ourselves of our sins, failures, wounds and disabilities. It is this understanding – and the acceptance of it – that is pleasing to the Lord.

“The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

What is a broken spirit? It is the spirit of those who know they have no capacity to be whole, know they are not God and know that no one, not themselves nor anyone else, can expect them to be capable of something only God is capable of.  “Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.” The poor in spirit are those who know they are not in control - and are good with that. Those who are so busy trying to heal themselves and make themselves clean and pure and worthy are certainly not barred from the Kingdom; it’s just that it’s so difficult for them to allow themselves entry because they can't grasp that the Kingdom is completely available to those who are incapable and needy. The door is wide open to the poor in spirit because Jesus, knowing our inadequacies and disabilities, did it all for us. He paid the full price of admission.  

If God is the only one capable of cleaning and recreating us, then what is our responsibility in the equation? To show up. That sounds simple and simplistic but in reality, in spite of all our spiritual activity, all our services to our parish community and in spite of all our intentions, prayers and devotions, being in a place of ‘no control’ is not an easy place for anyone to be. ‘Human Beings’ is a misnomer. We should be called ‘Human Doings’ because we prefer to do everything rather than be nothing. We ‘do’ because we feel much more in control – until we discover that all our ‘doings’ haven’t done much for us in the depths of our beings and we start to see that we have been existing on the surface of all our needs.

Lent should be a time of consciously showing up, a time of being there and being aware. Whatever your chosen Lenten commitments, sacrifices and offerings are, they should be more than just something you do; they should act as reminders not only of your spiritual poverty but also of the beauty and wonder of Christ’s sacrifice, a sacrifice that brought you the ultimate gift of being clothed in his garments of beauty. If all you do is focus on how much of a failure you are or how bad you are and never allow yourself to face full on the incredible fact that Jesus did it all and because of what he did, you are forgiven, blessed, loved, healed, transformed and set free, then there might as well not be an Easter. The Cross was not for our condemnation; the law already did that and still does that. The Cross was for our freedom and healing – freedom from guilt and shame and the healing of all the wounds we have sustained from our own inadequacies and our constant attempts to be in control of our own salvation. 

He gives us beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness so that we might be oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord so that he might be glorified. (Isaiah 61:3)

This Lent, may I suggest that whenever you go to prayer or however you choose to increase your inner awareness, remind yourself that without Easter, Lent has no purpose. Then ponder on this line from the Easter Exultet:

 

“O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!”

Be there and be aware. Breathe. And laugh with relief.