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.
The claim to autonomy is false as is the claim to endless victimhood. Both result in a kind of despair, a hopelessness, a paralysis of the soul. T.S. Eliot hints at this in his poem, Ash Wednesday. “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/ I no longer strive to strive towards such things”. No striving, no seeking, no hoping. Only a sense of disquiet and unease. “Because I do not hope to know again … Because I do not think /Because I know I shall not know.” Such lines underscore the sense of despair and hopelessness to which the only counter is prayer. The poem offers some sense of hope against hope, at least an awakening to the possibilities of turning.
Eliot’s poem draws upon Shakespeare’s sonnet # 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,/ I all alone beweep my outcast state … wishing me like to one more rich in hope,” altering the line “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope” ever so slightly to “desiring this man’s gift, and than man’s scope”. Gift not art or skill (or techne). Such a change suggests a sense of grace, of something given which alone counters the soul’s sense of being an outcast and allows for the awakening of the soul “to thy sweet love remembered.” That changes us from grief and despair to joy and gladness such that then “I scorn to change my state with kings.” A complete turn around, as it were, from “myself almost despising”to “sing[ing] hymns at heaven’s gate”. Ash Wednesday is about our awakening to the love of God which alone can redeem and restore, the love which integrates and unites our willing and our knowing, our sense and intellect.
It begins with the ashes imposed appropriately enough on our foreheads with the sign of the Cross signalling the recognition that it is our rational wills that are in disarray but also as seeking a renewal and a refashioning, the re-integration of our knowing and our willing. The turning is about God’s turning us to himself in his love for us shown most fully and most completely in Christ’s sacrifice. Lent is our participation in Christ’s passion and sacrifice without which there cannot be the overcoming of the dissassociation of intellect and sense, of knowing and desire. Eliot’s poem ends with the words“suffer me not to be separated / And let my cry come unto Thee.”
We return to the Lord your God “for he is gracious and merciful”. Such is the joy of repentance, the blessedness of Lent. Embrace the turning. Rejoice in repentance.
Return to the Lord your God
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday 2019