Where are our hearts?
Love is certainly in the air, especially in the providential and yet paradoxical conjunction of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday this year. We are being challenged to think more carefully and more deeply about love. “In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,” Shakespeare says in one of his celebrated love sonnets, “for they in thee a thousand errors note/ But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,/ who, in despite of view, is pleased to dote.” And not just our eyes, but our ears, our tongues; indeed all five sense and all five wits, find failings and faults in our loves. Our senses are not the means or the ends of our loving. It is our hearts. Where are our hearts? This is the question which the Gospel of Ash Wednesday raises, reminding us that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” It is really a question about our loves, both what we love or desire and how we love.
The poet and preacher, John Donne observes in a poem celebrating marriage that “fire ever doth aspire, And makes all like it self, turnes all to fire, / But ends in ashes.” His point about love and about marriage is that it is not wanted that it should end in ashes. God seeks something more for us.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, a beginning not an ending of the pilgrimage of love. We begin with ashes. It is not wanted that we should end in ashes. Ashes are the proverbial and biblical symbol of repentance which is always about our turning back to God in love from whom we have turned away in sin.. They are part and parcel of the project of penitence. “New and contrite hearts” are “created and made in us,” but only through “the lamenting of our sins and the acknowledging of our wickedness.” That can only happen through humility?
We are turned to the dust of creation in the words that belong to the Imposition of Ashes, the words of the Penitential Service. “Remember O Man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return,” words which are said at The Imposition of Ashes. Note the connection between words and actions. We are reminded of the dust out of which we have been formed, the dust of creation which connects us to every other living thing. And the ashes? They remind us of our sins and follies which in acknowledging signals that we seek something more. There is something more than dust and ashes in the mystery of Lent.
We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. The dignified dust of our humanity is about who we truly are in the sight of God. The ashes remind us of our sinfulness, to be sure. There is no way around that necessary but saving truth, but even more they remind us of the possibilities and the necessities of repentance. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned.” That is the Scriptural basis for the prayer for grace “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue; That we may walk with a perfect heart before thee.”
Ash Wednesday launches us upon an upward journey that seeks the attainment of virtue that belongs to who we are in the sight of God and speaks to our care and service of one another. It can only happen by recalling us to our creaturely origins and to our Fall from grace into a world of dust and death, of suffering and sorrow. The only antidote and the one which is prescribed on this day is humility: ashes in the form of the Cross placed upon our foreheads.
It is not about boasting of our humility, the kind of Uriah Heep humility which is really self-promotion: “there is no one so humble as I”! Hmm.. It is about the real humility which on the very ground of creation does not presuppose or presume any standing with God and knows instead its own failings and misery. Humility looks to God. Only so can we hope to be lifted up. Humility not presumption is the key to the journey of Lent. It is the key, too, to learning. It is all about our hearts and minds.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy