Lent 2007 : Ash Wednesday
A sermon preached by Fr Michael Fuller
- Isaiah 58:1-12
- 2 Corinthians 5:20 – 6:10
- Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
The Franciscan Richard Rohr insists that at its best, authentic spirituality helps us confront our pain. The season of Lent draws us into this idea by encouraging each of us to explore the idea that it is better to try and learn the lessons of pain rather than to unilaterally relieve ourselves of it. One can keep commandments, recite creeds and attend church. Yet, without confronting our pain and woundedness, we only run from the cycles of loss and renewal, death and resurrection, which are part of life. Our intelligence allows us to see these cycles at every level of the cosmos, and yet this same intellect also persuades us that we can make ourselves immune from them. It so doing we put obstacles in the way of experiencing salvation more abundantly.
Is this pain to be endured then? Is Lent an annual marathon for the Church? Do we stand this evening at a kind of starting line? Certainly not. Even Paul, that great lover of the metaphor of Christian faith as a race (cf Acts 20:24; 1 Cor 9:24-27; Gal 2:2; Gal 5:7; Phil 2:16; Phil 3:14; 2 Tim 2:5; 2 Tim 4:7-8 ), writes that trials cannot be overcome without the more contemplative virtues of “purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech and the power of God” (2 Cor. 6:6-7). To be initiated into this season of penitence through the imposition of ashes is to enter into a course of listening, waiting and hoping, not the spiritual equivalent of an arduous ascent of a great peak. Lent is a season in which we might better understand those desires that motivate our decisions and feed our avoidance of pain. It is a venue in which we clarify those desires gone amiss and deepen those which bear fruit in us and others (cf. Is. 58:12).
A central question in Lent, therefore, is: what are you going to do with your pain? Blame others? See it as a nuisance problem to be fixed or eliminated? The truth is that pain is part of the deal of being alive. If, however, we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it in some form: we become selfish, inflexible, concealing grief or postponing pain, we might play the victim and propagate needyness to expel negativity. This is all part of an agenda described by Isaiah (58:7) as: “hiding yourself from your own kin”. The Psalmist underlines the effect of this across the generations of families in the label (51:14) “blood guiltiness”. All of our strategies of avoidance fail because they do not grasp a fundamental truth: we do not handle suffering, it handles us. Only suffering and awe lead to genuinely new experiences, beyond the tired re-confirmation of bad habits that oppress as they take us and those we love captive.
Without pain, and seasons of grief and penitence, the cross of Christ becomes just a totem: a symbol of something Jesus did for us, but not something that invites us to the same pattern of life. This pattern is characterised long before Jesus’ birth by Isaiah (58:9,11,12): “remove the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil…The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places…you shall be called repairer of the breach…” The passion of the Son of God teaches us that resurrection will occur when death is trusted. Paul amplifies this by describing it as something that can happen frequently, daily (2 Cor. 6:9-10), living in faithful paradox: “as unknown, and yet as well known; as dying, and see – we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything”. We cannot adequately manufacture our own resurrection. The cross is a necessary journey into night. We must be convinced of out own need to die, and understand resurrection as that offered to each of us as a gift.
The real world is one of darkness and light, of weeds and wheat and we can never presume to have eliminated all the weeds. Matthew writes of the Jesus’ attitude to deceptive outer appearances (6:2-5). Whether you decide to reflect seriously this Lent on your attitude to pain or not, this world – mixed of dark and light – is all there is. In the spiritual life there is no elsewhere, the way is not around but through. It is this fact, amongst others, that has led me to offer and facilitate a course during Lent that explores the spiritual density and complexity of our everyday lives, and the spiritual potential of our human senses.
What we nowadays call sin is actually symptoms of sin – the effect of trying to exist outside of the cycle of birth, death and re-birth. We (you and me) are the major problem and the architects of our own downfall: we confess our sins and yet continue to embrace our shadows. Because our ego prefers a satisfying untruth to an unsatisfying truth we experience guilt about symptoms instead of altering the underlying illusion.
The very important question therefore is which self can we lose and which self needs to be preserved and nurtured? When Lent is seen as a season of suppression and self-annihilation, it assumes that the spiritual self will just ‘naturally’ emerge from the demise of a physical self that lacks chocolate, alcohol or meat. Commonsense should remind us that the self, however, is much more complicated than this. Indeed, it is this sense that Jesus augments when he instructs his followers to wash and anoint themselves (6:17) whilst at the same time devoting themselves to the prayerful development of a spiritual life (6:18). They follow a seemingly contradictory instruction, affirming both body and spirit, facing the death of their false self in secret (6:18) and rejoicing in the sensual abundance of what washing and oil represent spiritually (6:17). It takes a heart ready to contemplate the pattern of Christ’s whole life to synthesise the apparent paradox of such expectations.
We are prompted more than once in the Eucharist rite that follows this evening that the Christian God desires to make one out of two. Jesus said (John 15:4): “Remain in me, as I remain in you”. To remain, or abide, with Jesus during this season requires that we acknowledge our pain and our woundedness and hope for that authentic spiritual resurrection that occurs in these wounded places.
What the imposition of ashes shows us are that we are mortal and wounded. But what Lent encourages is consistent reflection that this wound – imposed on our foreheads in the sign of the cross – is also the place of greatest gift: a resurrection that can break the false self and simultaneously yearn for the true self, “hidden in Christ” as Paul tells us (Col. 3:3). If the abiding question is: what will we do with our pain? Then my final remark to help us answer this question is this prompt: our wounds will not become sacred until we admit having them and face the pain allied to them.
Fr Michael Fuller : 21st February 2007