Ash Wednesday: Wholeheartedness

 

Blessed be God who animates our lives and calls us to a Holy Lent. May we so humble ourselves. AMEN

We must be empty before we can be filled with the Holy Spirit.

The dark night of the soul is a gift.

The wilderness is a crucible of opportunity.

Those are some of the common lines which theologians use to ground and contextualize Lent, to offer meaning and motivation for entering this 40 day penitential season. 

The problem this year is that we entered the wilderness sometime in Lent 2020 and don’t seem to have emerged. Pandemics of viral and social and racial and political nature have been like the demons plaguing our isolation, our casting into the unknowable, the darknesses which simply pervade our days. Simple lines of reassurance of this season may ring hollow this year, or at least require some amplification and context.

Here we are on Ash Wednesday almost one year later and while I can point to some glimmerings and shimmerings along the way to sustain our Lenten journey, like Easter, and Christmas; like poetry and art; like imaginative and creative worship; like peaceful protests and family zooms, I am also mired as many are in fear, abeit waning, and grief, newly triggered. 

I want ashes. I want someone to touch my forehead and remind me that I am dust. I want human touch. 

And then I remember that Christ touches in unfathomable ways. 

And then I remember why we are here, not just for ashes, not just for a physical imposition, but also for invitation and blessing for the journey.

So let me say a few words about what gives me hope, not to mention energy for this remarkably long journey which feels more like the Exodus than the local wilderness. 

What gives me hope is that my heart still burns for the Living Christ. It doesn’t burn as much in the sanctuary as it used to. I yearn for bread and wine. I long to baptize. 

It burns in daily prayer. It burns in silence when my contemplation encounters the holy.

It burns when I listen to my grandchildren laugh. It burns when I see your faces on Zoom. 

What I have learned is that this heart-burn is coincident with wholeheartedness, or something sacred pouring into my very being. It is very different from the heart burn associated with indigestion!

I am reminded of a conversation between the poet David Whyte and the contemplative Br. David Stendl Rast in which Whyte was complaining of exhaustion.

“You know the antidote to exhaustion is not more rest” Brother David asserted

“then what is it?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness, You’re so exhausted because you can’t be wholehearted at what you’re doing...” 

I am indeed so exhausted because something or things have chipped away at my wholeheartedness. Grief for me; anxiety, frustration and fear for many. How to fill my heart again?

Perhaps the question this Lent is how do we recover or even find our wholeheartedness? What practices might help?

Any given year we enter Lent and its demands of deprivation and penitence on our lives in some state of exhaustion or seasonal affective disorder. And moreover, this year in particular we have not “recovered” from last year’s exhaustion and have instead come to this threshold of Lent with a weariness never known before. It is Job-like. It is lament psalm like. It is deeper and wider than any exhaustion previously known because it is also corporate, not just individual. It affects our families, our nation, our races, our cultures and our church. 

I invite you nevertheless to a holy Lent. Without ashes yet with immense reverence. Without physical touch yet with immense compassion. 

Whether in person or virtual, Lent is Lent and our call is our call. We are invited to adopt or reinvigorate practices with deepened piety which will in turn deepen our faith and strengthen our commitment to the Living Christ. The paradox is that from a more whole heart developed comes a freedom which many have feared is disappearing. It is the freedom of an uncluttered space, an emptying of preconditions and assumptions. It is the freedom to turn toward the God who fills us and causes our hearts to burn with love!

As you cross this threshold with whatever burdens you carry, lay them down, give them to God, empty yourself of .... slowly let God fill you through the Holy Spirit and the Living Christ with that fullness which is the wholeheartedness which restores and renews. Slowly, and gently, you will feel this love and mercy fill you with hope and energy. 

I invite you to a holy Lent. I invite you to cultivate a wholeheartedness of hope which will keep your heart burning with the love of God.