Author: CCW

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

We are the broken-hearted and the community of the broken-hearted. It is the condition of our blessedness. “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit”, the psalmist, David, reminds us in his great penitential psalm, the “Miserere mei, Deus” (Ps. 51, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”. And the prophet Joel bids us “rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God.” It is all about the turning in which there is the hope and the possibility of blessedness.

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

So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, Ash-Wednesday, itself a meditation on the idea of our turning that is shaped not only by the psalmist and the prophet but by Dante’s Vita Nuovo, the new life, and by Lancelot Andrewes’ Ash Wednesday sermon of 1619 about the nature of repentance, and, even more, the nature of mystical theology. “Repentance itself is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling,’” Andrewes observes, “to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away.” His text is from The Book of the Prophet Joel about “turning unto the Lord with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning”. The ways of purgation, illumination and union are set before us on this day of fasting and repentance, this day which marks the beginning of Lent.

To know ourselves as the broken-hearted is already the beginnings of the turn in us for it acknowledges, however obliquely and obscurely, the infinite and compassionate love of God; “for he is,” as Joel puts it, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil”. It is a wonderful insight into the nature of God expressed in and through the images that belong to human emotions and assumptions and yet points us to the transcendent mystery and wonder of God. It is that idea which Eliot in his elliptical and elusive way wrestles with, a wrestling with God out of an awareness of human uncertainty and brokenness, presumption and confusion – a kind of seeking and hoping even against hope itself. And a kind of learning, or the very least, a wanting to learn. “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still.” His poem undertakes a movement from “Because I do not hope to turn” to “Although I do not hope to turn”, which implies that a kind of turn is already underway. What makes the idea of the possibilities of turning is simply the reality of God himself. God turns to us in Jesus Christ who seeks our turning to him.

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“Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne. /But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in,/ Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” So begins the last poem by George Herbert entitled Love (III) which concludes his collection of poems known as The Temple. This Sunday, too, is about an invitation, an invitation to a journey. The poem in its three stanzas references three basic features of our Anglican liturgy: contrition – our sorrow for our sins; confession – our explicit acknowledgment of sin; and satisfaction – what restores us to wholeness. And yet the poem alludes as well to the essential character of the Christian journey as a pilgrimage of the soul by way of purgation, illumination and union. We are invited to a journey, to the pilgrimage of love. That is the character of our Christian journey concentrated for us in Lent.

There are of course different kinds of journeys, both ancient and modern. Some are flights from the world, a fleeing from all the attachments which belong to ordinary human lives and which are seen as ultimately illusory and nothing. We escape from them into a kind of emptiness, a nirvana of the spirit, if you will. All of the great religions of the world speak to the problem of our attachments though each in their own way.

Some are journeys of discovery, like Homer’s Odyssey. For Odysseus, the journey is about learning the order of things, the order of the cosmos and the place of our humanity in it. The way is through suffering, the suffering of ignorance and presumption in which truth is learned, at least by the hero. But the end is emphatically not union with God; at best there is a likeness, a commonality between the hero and the gods. He achieves his homeland, Ithaca, to be sure. And like his wife, the patient and wise Penelope, his journey weaves a story of virtue and understanding which delights the gods and men. But beyond Ithaca, his end is with all men in the land of the shades, in the indeterminancy and emptiness of Hades. There is even the sense that what belonged to his glory must also be forgotten; his last journey is to a land where his oars are mistaken for winnowing fans. Something is learned, but there is no abiding in the accomplishment, no end for man with the blessed ones. The end lies, instead, in the virtue of the striving, in what is learned through the suffering and in what is sung in the song afterwards.

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