“Make me a clean heart, O God, / and renew a right spirit within me”
And so it begins, the great ‘make-over’ which is the purpose of the pageant of Lent. Once again we are being challenged that life does not have to be just the ‘same old, same old’. Lent is the pilgrimage of love, the divine love which seeks the redemption of our human loves which are in such sad and sorry disarray.
And so it begins with dust and ashes recalling us to creation and repentance and challenging us about our hearts and minds. “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double-minded,” James exhorts us. “Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” and “not upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us. Where are our hearts? What do we treasure? Somehow this is critical to the whole project of transformation captured in the great Penitential Psalm of Lent and this day we call Ash Wednesday.
What does it mean to ask God to “make me a clean heart” and to “renew a right spirit within me”? Only that we know ourselves to be incomplete, fallen, and wounded, unhappy and sad, miserable and, perhaps, even in despair, and yet somehow desiring something more in spite of ourselves.
The poet ,T.S. Eliot, begins his poem called Ash Wednesday with the sense of despair and uncertainty that calls into question the whole idea and purpose of any kind of journey that might make us clean and new, as if this journey, the journey of Lent, were far more folly than even the Epiphany journey of the magi. “’A cold coming we had of it,/ Just the worst time of the year/ For a journey, and such a long journey: / The ways deep and the weather sharp, / The very dead of winter’,” Eliot says, quoting a nativity sermon of Lancelot Andrewes, and imagining the thoughts of the magi-kings about the hardness and the uselessness of the journey, “with the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly.” And yet the journey to Bethlehem concludes with the journey from Bethlehem whereby they are changed by virtue of what they had been given to see, “no longer at ease” in the ‘same old, same old’. Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and for us here in the Valley it might seem all folly, too, and, certainly, “just the worst time of the year/ For a journey”, “the ways deep” with mountains of snow, “the weather sharp” and cold, “the very dead of winter”.
And so Eliot begins with just that sense of hopelessness and uncertainty. “Because I do not hope to turn again/ Because I do not hope/ Because I do not hope to turn/ Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” That last phrase is a slightly altered quote from a Shakespearean sonnet, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” which is, perhaps, how we so often feel, “I all alone beweep my outcast state,/ And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,/ And look upon myself and curse my fate,/ Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,/ Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,/ With what I most enjoy contented least.” “Yet”, he says, “in these thoughts myself almost despising,/ Haply I think on thee”, and so something changes and he goes on to name what it is. “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings/ that then I scorn to change my state with kings.” Thy sweet love remembered. Such, too, is the meaning of Lent.
“Faith, hope, charity; but the greatest of these is charity” we heard on Quinquagesima Sunday, or at least we would have had not the winter storms intervened, a love song about the divine love that informs every aspect of the pageant of redemption that is the pilgrimage of Lent. Eliot alters one word from Shakespeare’s love sonnet; changing “this man’s art” to “this man’s gift”. This day would give us the gift of repentance and all through the remembrance of “Thy sweet love,” the sweet love of God, the God to whom we can turn. Repentance is simply our turning back to him from whom we have turned away. And how? By grace, by the gift of repentance, by God turning us and remaking us and renewing us in his love.
Desire is love. Ash Wednesday is about our desire for the divine love which alone can transform and redeem, restore and save. The divine love makes us clean and new but something is required of us, namely our awakening to the possibilities of hope. Eliot’s poem ends with such possibilities even in the face of our despair. The refrain changes ever so slightly from “because” to “although” in the last section of the poem. “Although I do not hope to turn again/ Although I do not hope/ Although I do not hope to turn” and ends with the prayer “And let my cry come unto Thee,” to God. Although I am full of doubts and uncertainties, nonetheless, I seek to turn, hoping against hope even in myself. “This is the time of tension between dying and birth.” Such is the very pattern of our Christian lives. Death and Resurrection. Despair and hope, but above all love, the love which seeks the transformation and renewal of our desires.
It is this awakening to such possibilities that makes Ash Wednesday so important. It is the counter to our easy fatalisms. We confront our hopelessness only to be awakened to hope, and, even more, to love. Repentance is the movement of God’s love in us recalling us to his love. We are the dust into which God breathes his spirit in creation; we are the dust, too, upon which fall the tears of Christ like great drops of blood upon the ground of Gethsemane and, even more, the blood which falls from his pierced head and side, hands and feet, upon the ground of Calvary. And all to redeem us, to recall us to the real truth and dignity of our humanity which is found in him.
We go up to Jerusalem to God and with God. But how? By dust and ashes. They are the words of this day recalling us to creation and redemption and calling us to repentance and study, to prayer and service. Only so can we be made clean and renewed in our spirits.
“Make me a clean heart, O God, / and renew a right spirit within me”
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2015
Christ Church & St. John’s, Cornwallis