Pride: But when you pray, go into your room - Lenten Reflection #1 (2012) [I first wrote these thoughts down in 1998 for a retreat I helped to direct for 4 or 5 years for the Jesuit Community at Boston College. I have used these thoughts more than once - I always try to freshen them up a bit, but honestly they seem as fresh today as ever and I wanted to share some of them with you. A bit of background seems appropriate. Ignatius Loyola organized his spiritual exercises into 4 weeks really 4 movements or phases. [The retreats that I directed occurred over 9 months, and were of the alternate form of a retreat in everyday life.] The dynamic of the exercises were something like this: The first week or phase of the Exercises consists of a reflection on our lives in light of God s boundless love for us. We come to see that our response to God s love has been hindered by patterns of sin, and endeavor to face these sins knowing that God wants to free us of everything that gets in the way of our loving response to him. The second phase consists of prayers and meditations on the person and life of Christ, and on His call to us into discipleship, ministry and personal relationship. We are brought to decisions to change our lives to do Christ s work in the world and to love him more intimately. The third phase consists of a meditation on the ultimate expression of God s love for us, that is, the suffering and death of Jesus for us. And finally, the fourth week or phase consists of a meditation on Jesus victory over death, His sharing His joy with us, and on our being missioned by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Ghost.] Tonight I will begin by assuming our realization of God s great glory and unbounded love for us. Our scriptural assurance of this can be found in Isaiah, Chapter 43, verses 1-7: 1 But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. 3 For I am the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Ethiopia and Seba in exchange for you. 4 Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you, I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life. 5 Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; 6 I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from
afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, 7 every one who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made." From the perspective of this certainty, we can dare (without fear of forever being lost) to think a little about how we separate ourselves from God s love. I will begin a personal example, a little struggle I have always had with Ash Wednesday. If this seems initially a bit humorous, it quickly turns deadly serious, as you will see. For me, the Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday in this cycle is a curious choice. On that one day, when we are given a symbol of our faith to be shared with all those people who see us, the Gospel tells us to be on guard against performing religious acts for people to see. I have always loved Ash Wednesday I hoped that night that everyone would notice I am Christian. They should have had only to look at my forehead to see that about me. In fact, I would have liked the whole world to see what I am. Look at me, I am somebody, I belong to something really big. Well, my struggle here is clearly one of pride, and the reality is that there are a couple of sobering problems with my prideful display. First of all, the rest of the world couldn t care less what I am. Unfortunately, I don t inspire so much as a glance from most people, and those who do see me are mostly trying to figure out how not to bump into me. The truth is, I imagine, that most people didn t even notice the smudge on my forehead. The second and even more troubling truth is this: In the blessing of the ashes, we say that we put them on our foreheads as a sign of repentance, or alternatively, to remind us that we are ashes and to dust shall we return - Nos cinerem esse et in pulverem reversuros cognoscimu. - these are not a symbol of our pride they are a symbol of our guilt and our sorrow! This symbol of our faith has plenty to do with what we are - we do belong to something big, all right. Frederich Buechner said in his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Beneath our clothes, our reputations, our pretensions, beneath our religion or lack of it, we are all vulnerable both to the storm without and to the storm within.
If ever we are to find true shelter, he argued, it is with the recognition of our tragic nakedness and our need for true shelter that we must start. In Shakespeare s King Lear, the king asks Is man no more than this? He then answered, as if in proof of Buechner s point that we are all poor naked wretches, Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. When others look at us they must see Jesus hanging on His cross! And they must see that we put Him there! Our history is written and our shame is well-known to all, and these ashes might pass for proof of Lear s tragic words. Once spoken they shatter all pretensions and unmask all delusions - the clothes we wear to protect ourselves from the pitiless storm. Others don t have to look at our foreheads to see what we are a part of. They have only to look at the homeless on our streets, the prisoners in our jails, the hungry women and children all across our land, our economically and politically oppressed neighbors. Edith Sitwell said in her poem Still Falls the Rain : Still falls the rain--- Dark as the world of man, black as our loss--- Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the cross Well she wrote that poem in 1940 (thus her count of the nails upon the cross.) Are there now two thousand and twelve nails? Don t we keep hammering away? Will we ever stop? But we know the story can t end with our wretchedness. As Thomas Merton affirms in his wonderful poem The Biography, And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime, And as each blow was paid with blood,
You paid me also each great sin with greater graces, For even as I killed you, You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company, Stealing my sins into your dying life, Robbing me even of my death. So, perhaps the ashes are not all about us, after all. Perhaps they are about the other side of the cross, the brighter side. Paul said to the Romans, Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more. And Merton concluded his little poem with these lines: If on your cross your life and death, and mine are one, Love teaches me to read, in you, the rest of a new history. Even T. S. Eliot said it in East Coker : The dripping blood our only drink The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good. So we are not victims of our own history. By these ashes we entrust ourselves to the healing care of the Lord who promises forgiveness and life to the dust that God has made. We really celebrate the Truth on Ash Wednesday. The truth of what we are and what is to become of us, yes, but more, we celebrate the Truth of God s Love. Why should we go to our rooms, whenever we pray, and pray to our God in private? Why should we keep our deeds of mercy secret? Because these things are not about us, that s why! They do not magnify us. If others look at us they may ask, Is man no more than this? Or in the words of the prophet Joel, Where is their God?
In truth we would have to answer, like Lear, I am the wretched thing itself. But as we join our wretchedness to the saving suffering of Christ, as we beg with these ashes for the grace to imitate and follow him, we find goodness and life. In this one symbol, one this one day, the whole of journey together so far is summarized: We see ourselves as sinners, but sinners loved by God. We repent and resolve to answer the call of Christ. We are healed and challenged, nurtured, and loved. And we are reminded that Love begs our response. (can t remember from where this comes) No, these ashes are not about pride. In the end, they are really all about humility. And so what about our ashes? How shall we be known as Christians? In John 13: 35 we learn that By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. A friend of mine asked once, Could you be convicted of being a Christian on the basis of circumstantial evidence by one who otherwise knows nothing about you?