“Turn unto the Lord your God”
We are the broken-hearted and the community of the broken-hearted. It is the condition of our blessedness. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit”, the psalmist, David, reminds us in his great penitential psalm, the “Miserere mei, Deus” (Ps. 51, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. And the prophet Joel bids us “rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God.” It is all about the turning in which there is the hope and the possibility of blessedness.
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
So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, Ash-Wednesday, itself a meditation on the idea of our turning that is shaped not only by the psalmist and the prophet but by Dante’s Vita Nuovo, the new life, and by Lancelot Andrewes’ Ash Wednesday sermon of 1619 about the nature of repentance, and, even more, the nature of mystical theology. “Repentance itself is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling,’” Andrewes observes, “to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away.” His text is from The Book of the Prophet Joel about “turning unto the Lord with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning”. The ways of purgation, illumination and union are set before us on this day of fasting and repentance, this day which marks the beginning of Lent.
To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is already the beginnings of the turn in us for it acknowledges, however obliquely and obscurely, the infinite and compassionate love of God; “for he is,” as Joel puts it, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil”. It is a wonderful insight into the nature of God expressed in and through the images that belong to human emotions and assumptions and yet points us to the transcendent mystery and wonder of God. It is that idea which Eliot in his elliptical and elusive way wrestles with, a wrestling with God out of an awareness of human uncertainty and brokenness, presumption and confusion – a kind of seeking and hoping even against hope itself. And a kind of learning, or the very least, a wanting to learn. “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still.” His poem undertakes a movement from “Because I do not hope to turn” to “Although I do not hope to turn”, which implies that a kind of turn is already underway. What makes the idea of the possibilities of turning is simply the reality of God himself. God turns to us in Jesus Christ who seeks our turning to him.
Repentance is our turning in which we seek purgation, the cleansing of our souls from the besetting sins of our lives and so there are the disciplines of fasting that belong to this day and to the season of Lent. The way of purgation is about confession and fasting; hence the exhortation to self-examination. This year Ash Wednesday falls on what is also traditionally the feast of St. David. Andrewes wisely notes that, biblically speaking, there are really only two kinds of fasting, what he calls David’s fast, tasting nothing whatsoever from morn to dusk, a hard fast, indeed, he says, “too hard” and what he calls Daniel’s fast, which is about restraining from “the meats of delight” and therefore “no flesh”, restraining ourselves from luxuries and delicacies. This is the kind of fast which the Church enjoins upon us, he says, a turning away from unnecessary delights, a giving up of things to which we have become too attached. Yes, for some that means chocolate! And for others ….? There is the cautionary note that what is sought for in this disciplining of our appetites “is not the decay of nature but the chastisement of sin”. As the poet, Robert Herrick puts it, the point of Lent is “to starve thy sin not bin”. Again everything turns on our relationship to God. That is primary. Lent is not a utilitarian exercise in self-improvement and money-saving.
But repentance, too, as a kind of circling means our turning to the Scriptures for the real food and meat of our souls and so the reading and meditation upon the Scriptures is an especially important feature of Lent. At the Penitential Service appointed for Ash Wednesday, if there is no communion, direction is given to read The Beatitudes with a meditation. The turning is about our blessedness through instruction. Such is the way of illumination grounded in the Word of God. As Eliot’s poem notes “Lord, I am not worthy/Lord, I am not worthy/ but speak the word only”, recalling the Centurion’s remarkable words of faith that occasion Jesus’s wonder precisely because they acknowledge the truth of God from the awareness of our own untruth and short-comings. The turning is enlightenment, illumination.
And there is the way of union that marks this day and the journey. We go up with Jesus, the possibility of our turning rests not just in his turning to us but in his embrace of our broken-hearts and lives. He enters into the brokenness of human suffering and misery through which he creates our blessedness. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, in short, the humble and broken-hearted as distinct from those who are full of pride and presumption, and “blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake”. Such things remind us of the way of the Cross, the new life that flows out of the body broken and the blood outpoured. For that is the love that transforms and renews but only out of our broken-hearts.
“Turn unto the Lord your God”
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2017