Ash Wednesday
By Mark Oakley, Thursday 7th February, 2008
I wonder how many of you tucked into a pancake last night? I have to admit that I love them, especially with a bit of Cointreau poured over them. I was in Norway at the weekend and they were planning to melt brown cheese on theirs. You know, of course, why pancakes were eaten before Ash Wedensday – basically to use up the dairy produce before the Lenten fast began. But there is something about a pancake that also speaks of what we must now, in Lent, confront. They are fat and they are flat. Fat and flat. Lent invites us to cook our lives another way. Lent invites us to confront the fat, as it were, by scrutinising how we are living our lives, how we may have become a consumer instead of a human being, how we may be buying or eating more and more because there is another hunger buried in us somewhere.
Many people think that the Church is here just to make people feel bad about themselves and that Lent is really good proof of the fact. This is not right. The Church is here to help us discover our humanity and to enable love and life to enlarge by attending to human needs not wants, others´as well as our own. Lent similarly is not here to say thou shalt not, thou can not, but to ask – is your life in balance, have you got things in proportion, where are adjustments needed? Traditionally it is a period of fasting, of learning that we can live with less, that we can travel lighter. But it is not just food we can fast from. We can fast from the angry word, the quick judgement. We can fast from the selfish action, the thoughtless behaviour, the cruel gossip. We all need to fast somewhere.
So, the pancake is fat but it is also flat. A flat life is one that just kills time before time kills us. And Lent is here to throw a rope to stop us living a flat, thin life but to discover depth, to deepen our relationships with God, each other and our own self, to take us away from surfaces and to push us into a dive into the spiritual adventure that cannot be achieved by pious thoughts or quick-fix so called spirituality, but by patient, prayerful, disciplined attentiveness. If your life is feeling flat, asks Lent, what´s gone wrong? What are you going to do about it? Where must you turn for help?
Today is named after ash, the stuff that is left when the fire has gone out. It is pretty useless stuff, frail and powdery, easily blown away. God tells Adam and Eve that they are but dust and they would do well to remember it. The ash at this service is placed on our heads in the form of a cross, imprinting over where the cross was placed at your baptism. The first stroke places and I on your head, the second stroke crosses it out to make the cross of Christ. This is an act of unselfing, the I is unmade into Christ. That is our hope. That sign is made on your head, the individual protective case for your brain, for your thinking, reactions, feelings. It is your mind, fragile and shaped by the past, but it is the place where you must decide whether this way of Christ is for you or not. Tonight is decision time again. If your discipleship has gone stale, indifferent, lifeless – then begin again and re-commit.
When you came in tonight you were given a stone. Together we form a little group like the one we heard about in the gospel. The woman was brought before Jesus. It does take two to tango but the law of the day only concerned itself with married women and not with married men. She has been caught in the act. She should be stoned, that´s what the law states. You can feel the anger – standards slipping everywhere and this new teacher seeming to undermine the traditions. And Jesus doesn´t say a word, he doodles in the sand.
It is easy for us on our treadmills of overwork, stress, tiredness, gusts of anger and diminshing awareness to see ourselves in the picture. When we get irritated or angry there are usually some warning signs or evidence of some unacknowleged shadows we are covering up. We relieve the pressure by projecting the shadows onto others. This is when we make the scapegoat, placing our own mess and baggage on him. Jesus will not play the game. He disengages, stoops, refrains. By doing this he can clarify it all with penetrating insight. There will be no spiritual progress until we begin to rein in our projections and see ourselves and our own state before we look at others. Christians must give up self-justification for Lent.
If you think the woman has got off lightly then perhaps think again…I suspect she saw what this man Jesus was doing and that the lesson dawned in her. Perhaps she began to see her own unfaithfulness and promise breaking and confronted her own truth – this can be the hardest thing of all, mentally and physically painful. How can we forgive ourselves? There is no condemnation from Jesus though, he releases her from self-hate but then tells her to move on now and change. Release then transformation.
Pick up that stone before you go to bed tonight. Hold it and grip it and ask yourself who you would like to throw it at, where you would aim it. Grip it and feel the energy it takes out of you, the tightness it reduces you to. And then drop it, just let it go, and see how it feels – take it out to the garden or to a park and leave it there. See how life is without carrying it around with you. Try it, really, give it a go. No one has to see, or know. But a lesson, a real lesson of Jesus Christ, might reach you. That hard, blunt, cold stone….can you let it drop?
