Tag Archives: ash wednesday

Chapter 54: the receipt of letters and presents.

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Without the abbot’s permission a monk may not receive from or give to anyone…

What is community?

For Ash Wednesday this year I was away on holiday with some of my dearest friends. We go away for February half term to the Lake District each year and this year it happened to coincide with the start of Lent.

I love Ash Wednesday. My theology and spirituality begins with the central premise that we are dust and not gods. God is God and He, by His grace gives us life and His Spirit. Each day of my discipleship I remind myself of that basic truth of what I am made of, not in some twisted attempt of self-flagellation but so that I can appreciate, in fuller measure, the overwhelming reality of the grace of God upon me.

Discipleship without starting from this humility is going to de-rail somewhere down the line.

Ash Wednesday is all about humility. Humility, says the writer of Proverbs, is the fear of the Lord (Proverbs 22:4) and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). Humility is about knowing who you are. Charles Spurgeon once wrote,

True humility will lead you to think right about yourselves, to think the truth about yourselves. (Charles Spurgeon, The Soul-Winner (Tennessee: Lightning Source, 2001) p.15)

If our anthropology (our understanding of humanity) begins anywhere other than as creatures of the earth, coming from the same primordial ooze as everything else then we have begun in the wrong place. If we imagine, for even one moment, that we are born special, set apart from the rest of creation, that we are in some way born of the same substance as God then we are not being truthful.

But we must also remember that God has lifted us up from the dust and, in his gentle hands, formed us and shaped us into His beloveds.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (James 4:10 NIV)

It starts in dust but it moves away from that into the hands of our Father who shapes us and moulds us into His people. We always remain dust, flesh, finite and fallible but, if we turn to God He will lift us up and redeem us.

That is why, for this Ash Wednesday, I created a liturgical space for my friends and I to reflect on the ash cross that we mark on our heads each year but also the cross of water some use at baptism. Ash Wednesday points forward to our redemption where we enter into the life of Christ who took on flesh that we may become one with God. Through the water of baptism we are renewed and we clothe ourselves in Christ, who did not reject flesh and dust but redeemed it by His life, death and resurrection.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Once we enter into the Body of Christ the symbol of flesh and God united we seal it with mark of oil for commissioning, being set apart for a task. We are called to be used by God’s Spirit who breathes through us and makes us living beings.

The service was called ‘Ash Water Oil’ and at each stage we discussed a word that has spoken to me through the Rule of St. Benedict which resonated with the theology behind each symbolic cross on our foreheads. For ash, we discussed ‘humility’, for the reasons expressed above. For water we discussed ‘obedience’; how we as disciples must turn to God and obey his hands as they shape us and redeem us. We follow in the footsteps of Christ as he obediently committed his body to death in order to be raised again. We reflected on these two quotes,

…faith exists only in obedience, is never without obedience. Faith is only faith in deeds of obedience. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001) p.64)

For the Christian to be perfectly free means to be perfectly obedient. True freedom is perfect service. (Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: toward a constructive christian social ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) p.131)

Finally, for oil we discussed ‘community’; how, through humility and obedience we are led, by God, into the community of believers and the community of the Trinity. The characteristics of Christina community should be marked by humility, rooted in flesh but filled with the Spirit, and obedience to the will of the Father through the example of Christ.

It was this final discussion on what we understood about community that sparked the most conversation. Community as a word is hard to pin down because it’s use is so varied and conflicting. We all think we know what it means and what it looks like and feels like but it shifts endlessly, it’s definition is always, it seems, just out of reach. We hear just an echo of its definitive state.

As I heard my friends struggle to find words for what this thing they are passionate about I was reminded of how we describe the Trinity. There’s a quote (which I can’t source) which says,

The Trinity is not a formula to be understood but a community to be experienced.

Why am I telling you all this?

When reflecting on seemingly cruel and strict chapter in the Rule of St. Benedict, it strikes me that the reason this and other chapters challenge is because it is cutting deep within that which makes us fallen beings. At the times of uncomfortableness, I can often find where I am finite and fallible. In this particular case with this strict removal of a monk from the ties to the outside world I am challenged by my need to be identified with material possessions and relationships with other people however well meaning I think they are. How many relationships must I lose before I realise I only need God? I think we judge too soon the answer to that question.

I can hear the protests and the reasons why we don’t need to sacrifice that much to know that we need God but I know for myself that I only want to say that because if I were to live it out I would find it too painful. The cost to this call is too much and so we don’t bother trying. To comfort ourselves we judge those who do that insane, unnecessarily severe but I look at the monks I know who have risked it and found great spiritual treasure from the discipline.

This of course doesn’t make it any easier to contemplate how much I am willing to cut myself off in order to discover the life of total dependence on God!

Reflection

I have been thinking a lot recently about where God is calling Sarah and I next. I keep returning to this call to monastic life and how it might look alongside other aspects of our calling. The call to humility, obedience and community fills me with delight even when it becomes slightly more uncomfortable than I’d like. Chapters like this one, where an abbot is given charge over letters and parcels, strangely make sense to me and in that sensation I am aware of how counter cultural that is.

I find myself thinking,

Maybe the Church should be living out a completely different culture to the one around it. Maybe we have completely lost sight of what true discipleship looks like.

I think of that quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Is the price that we are paying today with the collapse of the organized churches anything else but an inevitable consequence of grace acquired too cheaply?… We poured out rivers of grace without end, but the call to rigorously follow Christ was seldom heard. What happened to the insights of the ancient church, which in the baptismal teaching watched so carefully over the boundary between the church and the world, over costly grace? (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, p. 53-54)

I fall into humble silence before my God and ask for Him to lift me up out of the miry dust and form me into the likeness of His Son, to redeem me into His life and to fill me with His Spirit.

Come, Lord Jesus.

The Pope Is Dust Just Like You

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As the evening approached I began to get more and more excited. I haven’t been as expectant and excited about a service since the Midnight Communion a few months ago. Ash Wednesday had arrived!

This day, more so than most other feast day, gets to the core of my theology and spirituality. A preacher and minister has to work very hard to fudge the the central message of this celebration and act of worship.

Remember you are but dust and to dust you shall return. Turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the season of Lent, a period of 40 days (plus Sundays) dedicated to repentance and re-dedication to discipleship. This season is known for the tradition of giving up/fasting from certain luxuries or habits that distract us from the work of discipleship and our journey to holiness. The restraining from luxuries, in the modern day, has become seen as some self-inflicted punishment and has betrayed the true reason for participating in such activities: to re-dedicate your life and attention towards Christ, to clear our mind of striving after short-term pleasures and receive the eternal pleasure of knowing God.

But this post is not about fasting and Lenten disciplines.

I approached Ash Wednesday this year with Pope Benedict’s resignation very much on my mind. I, like many others, have been struck by the timing and the manner in which the pope’s statement was made. Through this short and concise proclamation of intent, the pope communicated one thing: humility.

True humility is about naming the truth of one’s status. It is a fine virtue to public live out just before the celebration of Ash Wednesday because humility has its roots in humus (of the earth). The pope’s public declaration clearly spoke of his weakness, a self-awareness of his defects and mortality and limitedness in fulfilling the role to which God called him. In a world obsessed with promoting the strength and potential of humanity, this public resignation sings of our true nature: we are dust.

The pope’s conviction stands powerfully against the lie of this age which says humanity is the source of transformation in the world. We, as a race, need no one else to be great. If we could harness some metaphysical goodness and our inner strength we can achieve all we want and imagine. There is no god but us; we are the source of our own destiny. In this environment it is no surprise that the pope’s resignation and the humility expressed in his statement confuses and baffles our culture.

And so it is with Ash Wednesday! We stand prophetically against the humanism of our society, which, in many forms (Christian as well as non-Christian), grips our philosophy. We reject the temptation to stand on our own and name ourselves ‘good’ and beautiful, worthy of praise and adoration. We deny the powerful narrative that suggests that, if we work hard and gather together we can muster up ‘love’ (whatever that means!) and build a bright future for ourselves. This is a lie!

As Christians we must start with the humility that the pope lived out in making the public statement: we are limited, we are mortal, we are dust.

But the Christian story doesn’t end there, in the fatalistic nihilism that this truth can lead us to. The Christian message is that we are dust (and not God) but, by the grace of God alone, we are able to become living beings. We are not born as living beings, as things worthy of attention and praise. We are born as dust.

Prior to the pope’s announcement our attention was captured with the debate over equality. At the heart of this conversation was the bill of Human Rights which I spoke about in ‘The Hunch, the Compulsion and the Overwhelming Pain’. It begins with the statement: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…’ On Ash Wednesday and through Lent we, as Christians, proclaim a different truth which sounds seductively similar but distinctive: ‘All human beings are born dust and equally in need of God.’

We are equal in the sense we are equally dust, limited, mortal, nothing but we can receive the grace of God if we turn to Him and receive His gift. We cannot deny the giver and receive the gift, allowing its power to transform and change to manifest itself in our lives.

The pope shouted above this view that we, human beings, are the source of significant and lasting transformation of the world, a different view. The Catholic Church doesn’t need Pope Benedict to be the Body of Christ. The Catholic Church, as it has done through out history, needs God, the sole source of transformation and change.

Ash Wednesday begins a narrative in the Church’s calendar that journey’s through Good Friday into Easter and won’t end until Pentecost. There, in the upper room with the first  disciples we become aware of our dust-ness but then the Spirit of God moves and causes our lifeless bodies to sing of life, not just existence, but eternal life. The Spirit of God, like a breeze, blows through that room and causes those heaps of dust dance, refracting the light that shines from Christ, the risen Lord.

There’s two failures we as Christians can make: inadvertently deny our dependence on God by promoting humanity as essentially ‘good’ and able to change the world, the other is to deny the power of God to use us, limited and mortal as we are, to show Himself as the sole source of eternal transformation. We so often speak too much of God’s love for us and fail to speak against the notion that we are worthy of that love. We can react to this by pushing too much the sin and darkness of humanity and fail to acknowledge that God has chosen to use our frail bodies.

The pope, in humility, made a bold statement against the humanism of popular culture and proclaimed our absolute dependence on God’s free, unmerited grace on us, unworthy as we are. He proclaims God is good and His love endures forever. We remain powerless until God’s power manifests itself through us. We must clear our lives of our own striving to hold power and receive afresh the gift of God’s presence that transforms us into something.

We are nothing made something by God’s everything.

We are dust caught in the wind of God’s Spirit, dancing in His Light.