by CCW | 17 February 2021 14:00
Psalm 51 is the quintessential penitential psalm. One of the seven penitential psalms, as they came to be known (psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, 143), it captures wonderfully the longing of the soul for God’s goodness out of the profound awareness of sin. “Against thee only have I sinned.” However exaggerated this may seem, it states the truth about all sin. All sin is against God. When we sin against one another and against ourselves, we sin against God and the goodness of his creation. It is in this sense that “against thee only have I sinned” is to be understood, much in the same way as we pray, “Almighty God of whose only gift cometh wisdom and understanding”. All sin is against God in the same way that all wisdom is of God. Every sin opposes the good that is God himself.
Such is the great insight of this penitential psalm which is front and centre on Ash Wednesday. Dust and ashes symbolise creation and redemption. Ashes are imposed on our foreheads, the seat of the rational will, as a sign of repentance. Repentance is our turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. The ashes are imposed with the words from Genesis: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to the humble ground of our creation. We are the dust into whom God has breathed his spirit but whom we have spurned in the arrogance and presumption of all our sins. We are recalled to creation in the awareness of our separation from creation.
But as sinners who know that we are sinners means to embrace the disciplines of repentance, literally “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” (BCP[1], p. 614). That means the heartfelt turning back to God “by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word” (BCP[1], p. 612). This is not a list from which we may pick and choose. It means all those things. Together they signify the deep desire of our souls for the truth of our being in the rejection of all the things which stand in the way of ourselves in union with God and in the acquisition of what properly belongs to our life with God. Lent concentrates wonderfully the three-fold nature of the pilgrimage of the soul: purgation, illumination, and union or perfection. These are all present to us in the programme of Lent and in its beginning on Ash Wednesday.
We begin in ashes but not so as to end in ashes. Our beginning is with God even as our end is in God. We seek his will and power and truth to make us new. We only live in this divine activity of being renewed. But to be renewed is to know that we are broken, not whole. “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit.” Nothing could be more counter-culture; no greater contrast possible between this and the therapy culture of emotional well-being. We are meant to feel troubled and to know our brokenness; “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.” Contrition, confession, and satisfaction form the underlying spiritual patterns of our liturgy in relation to the three-fold pilgrimage of our souls to God.
We are meant to feel sorrow for sins committed, whether “in thought, word or deed,” and thus acknowledged as sins, not merely explained and excused away as of no importance. Yet, far from being negative, this is the great positive that belongs to the whole idea of our being turned back to God by God turning us back to himself. And this is what we are meant to seek and want; in short, to want what God wants for us. Contrition is what we are meant to feel in the awareness of sin. It means to know that you have contradicted the very truth of your own being. It is not about outward correctness and social conformity; it is about an inward awareness of truth and goodness. The note of contrition here belongs to the deeper desire for the goodness of God. We are asking God to make us clean and new. Such is the truth of our desires.
John Donne, in one of his holy sonnets, expresses this desire in a most remarkable, extravagant, and intentionally disturbing way. “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” he prays, … “that I may rise and stand, o’er throw me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new”, echoing Psalm 51. Those strong verbs of alliterative violence – batter, break, blow, burn – stand in contrast to gentler verbs, such as “knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend,” verbs which we might associate with the Scriptures. Donne, out of an intense awareness of the abyss of sin that separates us from God, seeks God’s force to restore him and make him new, a force which takes on all of the features of extreme violence even as sexually charged, indeed, even as rape. “Take me to you, imprison me, for I except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” This is strong stuff but actually speaks to the language and dialect of Scripture itself and to what it teaches us.
God speaks in the Scriptures to move us even if that means appearing in forms that express some human feeling or attribute. Sometimes God speaks to us in sorrow, sometimes in wrath, sometimes in complaint. As Andrewes puts it, “that He complains of us is not that we fall and err, but that we rise not and return not … put[ting] off our repentance” (Ash Wednesday, 1602). In other words the Scripture as the Word of God seeks to move us to the necessity of being cleansed and of being made new, of being enlightened and of being united to God.
The attribution of human passions to God is but a way of speaking. “The immutable constancy of the Divine nature is not subject to them”, however much they are presented to us in the Scriptures. It is not only not proper and “not fitting for God thus to express Himself. But,” as Andrewes adds, “that He, not respecting what best may become Him, but what may best seem to move us and do us most good, chooseth of purpose that dialect, that character, those terms, which are most meet and most likely to affect us” (ibid.). In such a light, we may take to heart Donne’s strong and violent language and take to heart as well the words of this penitential psalm and so enter into love’s strong ways to make us whole. That will be to make a “holy Lent”.
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2021
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