Day: March 27, 2022

“Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost”

It should be the mantra for our divided and fragmented world in the attempt to reclaim the spiritual and intellectual principles that give meaning to human life. We are in the wilderness in a flight from the world, a flight from reality; the very opposite of the wilderness of Exodus and of Lent. For we are scattered in the confusions of our minds, scattered in the pride of the imaginations of our hearts, as Mary’s Magnificat suggests.

This Sunday looks back to the Exodus and to the other Sundays in Lent and looks ahead to Holy Week and Easter. It is simply about what is learned in the wilderness journey, our journey to God and with God as the principle of all reality. The Exodus was about a journey from slavery into freedom. What enslaves us is more than something external, more than the restraints and limits that belong to the natural world and to human life. The deeper forms of enslavement have to do with the realities of sin which are about a denial of God and of the goodness of creation. The modern gnostic flight from reality sees the world as something fearful and evil yet assumes a human freedom from the world through the fantasies and illusions of our control over nature; a flight into a technological future away from the limits of the world. It is no longer God’s world to be engaged respectfully and with care. It is an evil from which we assume we can escape. The movie ‘Interstellar’ is, perhaps, one illustration of this theme – a flight from an earth which we have made inhabitable to other planets but with the realization, perhaps, that the one thing we cannot escape is ourselves.

Lent is about facing the reality of ourselves. The good news, paradoxical as it may seem, is the knowledge that we are all sinners. Good news?! Indeed, because we can only know ourselves as sinners through the realization of what is prior to our sins and follies, namely, our own created being and our place within the created order.

Lent began on Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes signaling the acknowledgement of ourselves as sinners. Turning to God in repentance, however, is not an act of human pride and ascetic accomplishment; in other words, a work of man. It is our response to the grace of God moving in us in the deepening awareness of ourselves as sinners. It belongs, in other words, to that twofold sense of freedom from what enslaves us and our freedom to God; “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue,” as The Penitential Service rather beautifully puts it, “that we may walk with a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore” (BCP, p, 614). Such a movement is about our being gathered to God.

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