Sermon for Ash Wednesday
“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
John Donne’s sonnet serves as a commentary on this verse from Psalm 51. “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/ As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seeke to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.”
The sonnet’s extravagant imagery, unlikely as it might seem, helps us to take Ash Wednesday seriously in the sense of our extreme separation from God, on the one hand, and the desire for restoration and renewal, on the other hand. Both belong to the project of Lent and to the dynamic of love, “love divine, all loves excelling,” as finishing, perfecting, and renewing our human loves and lives. In another poem, The Good Night, part of an epithalamion, a poem celebrating marriage, Donne notes that “fire ever doth aspire,/ And makes all like it self, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” only to note about the newly-weds that this is that “which these cannot do”. Ashes are not the end of love. Dust and ashes on this day mark the beginning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love renewing and restoring or setting in order our disordered selves.
That love is the divine love which, as Donne suggests, we seek in order to be made new. Nothing else will do. Our returning to the Lord, our God, with all our heart, as the prophet Joel exhorts us, is only possible through God turning us back to himself from whom we have turned away. Donne’s sonnet meditates on the radical meaning of what that turning means for us. It means being made new.
He asks God as Trinity to “batter” him, an image of violence and force. He suggests that something more extreme is necessary for our good beyond the milder, more gentle biblical images of piety about God “knocking” on the door of our hearts, “breathing” his spirit upon us, “shining” down benevolently upon us, and “seeking to mend” us. Donne says this is not enough. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” The alliteration of the ‘b’ sound in batter, bend, break, blow, burn reinforce these images of force. Overall, the poem makes the necessary but forceful point that God has to break us to make us. Yet the imagery of violence which is maintained throughout the sonnet really reflects the violence of sin and evil in all that opposes God, in the devil and us, that results in the violence that God suffers on the Cross for us.
