by CCW | 5 March 2025 14:00
The words of the prophet Joel reverberate throughout the Ash Wednesday liturgy. “Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned,” we pray. They are framed as well by recalling the dust of our creation. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Dust and ashes: the dust of the ground of our created being and the ashes of repentance. Yet both the dust and the ashes are profoundly about our turning and being turned.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is in every way a season of renewal, a renewal of our hearts and minds in the things of God. It is about our turning back to God from whom we have turned away. Yet that turning is itself the motion of God’s love in us returning us to the truth and dignity of our humanity found, as it only can be found, in God. It is all about the turning, or the “turning again,” as T.S.Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday puts it.
The poem begins in an almost mantra-like fashion. “Because I do not hope to turn again,” It begins, it seems, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. He quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” with its sense of separation and abandonment, of “myself almost despising,” yet as one who “looking upon himself and cursing his fate” still hopes, “wishing me like to one more rich in hope,/ Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, /Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” Eliot changes but one word, art for gift, “Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope.” It is a nod perhaps to where his poetic meditation ultimately leads. In the sixth and last section of the poem, the mantra turns to “although I do not hope to turn” and ends with a prayer. “Suffer me not to be separated and let my prayer come unto thee.” Hope, over and against even the denials of hope, ultimately cries out in prayer, a longing for a sense of unity and wholeness.
Between the beginning, which seems to eclipse any possibilities of continuing, and the ending, which at the very least opens out the possibilities of renewal, there is a kind of meditation. The poem is a meditation upon the ambiguities, the hesitancies, and yes, even the denials of desire, but as interspersed with the countering cries of the heart in the language of prayer. There are the cries for mercy, for forgiveness, for salvation, for “our peace in His will,” quoting Dante. The poem captures something of the disquieting unsettledness of our contemporary culture and our restless hearts.
And yet it offers hope. It ends in prayer because prayer, like a deep-flowing stream, runs strongly throughout the poem, sometimes “with sighs too deep for words,” at other times, breaking into the language of prayer. As if for all our sophistications, cynicisms, and despair, we cannot suppress the profounder motions of our own souls. Almost in spite of ourselves, we find ourselves in prayer. There is a turning again. “Have mercy upon me, O God, … according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences” (Ps.51.1) as the great penitential psalm of Lent prays.
We are being turned again. We do indeed hope against our hope to turn again. “Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps.51.10). There is something stronger than the oblivion of our hopelessness, so willful and so deadly. There is something stronger than our will to nothingness, something stronger than the despair which is the denial of desire. Ash Wednesday is the renewal of our desire for God.
“Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Joel 2.13), Joel reminds us. The return is repentance. What makes repentance possible indeed, necessary, is the idea, so unshakably real, that God has turned to us. He turns to us in spite of ourselves. He turns to us “while we were yet sinners” (Rom.5.8). His turning is the strong love which defeats the despairing disquietude of our souls. There is someone to whom we can turn again, someone to whom we can pray, “And let our cry come unto thee”.
Why is that idea so real, so unshakably real? Because it has already borne all our rejections, all our denials, and all our despair. Although we kick against it, we cannot altogether extinguish it from our souls. It breaks through. Such is the burning love of the crucified Christ. His burning love for us in his turning to us and in turn our burning love for him is the love which is wanted to burn ever so strongly in us as well.
In the crucified Christ, we see the strong love of God which will not have our love end in ashes, the ashes of despair, but makes out of our ashes a beginning, a renewed beginning, a beginning again. The ashes of Ash Wednesday are the ashes of repentance, not the ashes of death and despair. They are the ashes of our turning again that dispels the hesitancies of our souls and the despair of our hearts. The turning again that is the renewing of our minds and hearts in fully and freely willing the will of him who has turned to us and turns us to himself.
What is wanted is that we should dispel those hesitancies of our souls and turn again full-heartedly, our wills fully and freely willing the will of him who has turned to us and turns us to himself.
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/03/05/meditation-for-ash-wednesday-3/
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