Ash Wednesday: Behold, you desire truth deep within me

Ash Wednesday 2024

The phone call came a week ago: “Can we start next week?” So, from tomorrow, the builders are in. (What have you given up for Lent Fr Gary? Toilets!)

So it’s been a ferocious few days since a site visit on Friday of moving furniture, taking pictures down; clearing rooms which will be gutted, updated or mended.

I’ve found long-lost things, stuff I wonder why I bought and enough dust and spiders’ webs to make one shudder with disgust. I’ve agonised at the choices of sanitary ware, flooring, and paint; re-jigged bits of the diary and thought, well, this is going to be Lenten. “About a fortnight” is a term builders use with a singularly highly elastic sense of how time works…

It’ll be a bit of a transformation, yes, all sorts of things will be fixed, and yes it’ll be great. But… the dust, the mess, the noise, the disruption, the not finding things, the inevitable frustration, the grappling with reality, the anxiety: will it turn out ok in the end? Will it look nice? Will it all work? And that nagging doubt: will I have messed it up in the choices I’ve made?

You’ll all have worked out that I’m using this as a now overspun metaphor for Lent. But at least it’s got me out of (what other clergy will attempt) a tortuous attempt to elide Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day…

Lent is a ‘springtime for the soul’ a penitential season in which we prepare for Easter. It’s our annual opportunity and invitation to ‘set our house in order’. The cobwebs, dust, things in unexpected places, the items we wonder ‘why?’ – are our sins. In this season, we set about doing ‘what needs doing’ – sorting out those bits and pieces, repairing and renewing our spiritual lives – that which we’ve put on the ‘to do’ list but not (perhaps for a long time) got around to doing.

We do so framed on this day, knowing we do this in the light of our own mortality. Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. God reminds us that we need to get on with it, we’ll answer for it, we’re responsible for it.

That’s a deeper question than my ‘Have I made the right choice in the colour of the bathroom walls?’ One of the hard realities of human life is the effect of the choices we make: the things we have done that we should not have done, the things we should have done that we left undone.

The write Francis Spufford in his book: “Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense” asks us to discern the difference between the times we ‘mess things up’ (he uses a slightly more florid phrase) because of things beyond our control – and the times we ‘mess things up’ through the deliberative choices we make in our lives. He refers to this as the ‘Human propensity to mess things up”:

“You’re lying in the bath and you notice that you’re [whatever age] and that the way you’re living bears scarcely any resemblance to what you think you’ve always wanted; yet you got here by choice, by a long series of choices for things which, at any one moment, temporarily outbid the things you say you wanted most.  And as the water cools, and the light of Saturday morning in summer ripples heartlessly on the bathroom ceiling, you glimpse an unflattering vision of yourself as a being whose wants make no sense, don’t harmonize: whose desires, deep down, are discordantly arranged, so that you truly want to possess and you truly want not to, at the very same time.  You’re equipped, you realize, for farce (or even tragedy) more than you are for happy endings…You’re human, and that’s where we live; that’s our normal experience.”

That passage could apply to me, to you, to the woman caught in adultery who encounters Jesus as the angry crown is about to stone her to death. “How?” she might ask, we might ask, “How did I get here… how did I manage to mess things up?”

The answer is, we chose to.

As Spufford, again puts it:

“You can get a long way through an adult life without having to acknowledge your own personal propensity to mess things up; maybe even all the way through, if you’re someone with a very high threshold of obliviousness, or with the kind of disposition that registers sunshine even when a storm is howling all around. But for most of us, the point eventually arrives when, at least for an hour, or a day, or a season, we find we have to take notice of our propensity to mess things up.”

He describes how that comes at a point in life when a relationship has failed, a career has stalled, a promotion denied; a loved one has died, a glass of wine each night turns into a bottle, a relationship with a child has faded to that of a taxi service, retirement asks what we’ve achieved, or that every day is any day – wasted time in a job you don’t enjoy – disclosing how our choices – not anyone else’s – have vetoed so many hopes and dreams. We discover we’re broken.

Lent is the point where God powerfully reminds us that he can help us mend. That is, after all, not a bad way to describe Atonement: a-mending things, people, relationships. God invites us to engage once more in a journey to choose to mend the things we’ve messed up: our relationship with him; our relationships with others; and crucially – our relationship with ourselves:

Mended is not the same thing as never broken. We are not being promised that it will be as if the bad stuff never happened.  It’s amnesty that’s being offered, not amnesia; hope, not pretence.  The story of your life will be the story of your life, permanently.  It will still have the kinks and twists and corners you gave it.  The consequences of your actions, for you and for other people, will roll inexorably on.  God can’t take those away, or your life would not be your life, you would not be you, the world would not be the world.  He can only take away from us—take over for us—the guilt and the fear, so that we can start again free, in hope.  So that we are freed to try again and fail again, better.  He can only overwhelm [us] with grace... Grace is forgiveness we can’t earn.  Grace is the weeping father on the road.  Grace is tragedy accepted with open arms, and somehow turned to good.  Grace is what Jesus’  wasteful death on Skull Hill did.

Lent is God’s call to us to put down the stones we are tempted to throw at others that disclose not their sins but cover and hide our judgement upon ourselves. It’s time now to stop blaming others for our mistakes. God sees and knows what we have done.

Lent is God’s call to renew and rebuild again and again by his grace and mercy before we find that we have ruined ourselves. God sees and knows what we have done.

Lent is God’s call to us to attend to his loving desire to mend the bits of us that are broken. Why on earth would we not want to be fixed? God sees and knows what we have done.

And, despite, despite, despite our propensity to mess things up:  why does he do this? Because he loves us. So much so, that he sends his Son to die for us.

Roses are red; Violets are blue

Lent fixes lives if God forgives you.