KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 6 March
Return to the Lord your God
The words of the prophet Joel signal the whole project of Lent. It is all in the turning of ourselves to God. Such is repentance, “a kind of circling, redire ad principia, to return to him from whom we have turned away” (Lancelot Andrewes).
What is that turning away? It is sin understood in terms of the separation of ourselves from the truth of our being and knowing and the separation within ourselves in the disconnect between our knowing and our willing; in short, the fatal separation of intellect and will.
Lent seeks the re-integration of our essential being, the re-integration of our knowing and our willing. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of that project precisely in terms of desire. “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also,” Jesus tells us in Matthew’s Gospel reading for today. What do we desire or cherish or treasure?
Lent is the pilgrimage of love in which love sets our loves in order. “Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” as the great penitential psalm of Lent puts it (Psalm 51.10). Such seeking is prayer. But it is predicated upon an awareness in ourselves that things are not as they should be or as we would like them to be either about ourselves or about our world and day.
The wonder of Ash Wednesday and Lent lies in the possibilities of the turning, the turning again and again to God. In our world and day, the question of the turning itself is the question for it implies the realization of our own incompleteness. In the folly of the autonomous self we think ourselves to be complete and whole. It is one of the paradoxes, even contradictions of our age which Ash Wednesday wonderfully counters. The Slovenian philosopher, Slovoj Zizek, observes this paradox or contradiction noting that we assume the complete autonomy of ourselves in the freedom to say and do everything and anything, even to change our sexual identities, to assert ourselves as selves, and yet, at the same time, we claim endlessly to be victims of one sort of perceived injustice or another. In other words, we assert our utter autonomy only to assert that we are constrained and limited by others.
