From Wednesday's Ashes....

"Lent is the season of renewal, the springtime of the spirit." (Fr. Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles)

And so we come to Lent again. The penitential purple banners and priestly vestments appear in our churches again; the feasting of Shrove Tuesday is over; the liturgical music is simplified; and the Alleluia's disappear from the liturgy until the great feast of Easter. Lent began this past Wednesday, and we received the sign of the Cross on our foreheads, marked in ashes collected from the burnt palms left over from last year's Palm Sunday celebration. We are reminded that we come from dust and that we return to it, or else we are told to turn away from sin and to be faithful to the Gospel.

This Ash Wednesday I found myself actually looking forwards to Lent, and I must confess that I do not usually experience any positive anticipation of this season. Lent is an uncomfortable time of year through which I would gladly rush to arrive more quickly at the joyous celebration of Easter. It is not natural to man to seek out opportunities of self-denial, to welcome pain, or to wish for sorrow. Too often we associate Lent in our minds only with fasting, penance, suffering, sadness, sacrifice, and other things that are negative. Yet Lent is not a negative time of year, and we miss out on its depth and richness if we can see no further than the things we must give up. So at last I begin to see a more positive side to Lent, and I would like here to share with you some thoughts on that topic.

The Church instructs us during this time to do acts of charity, prayer, and fasting. I suspect that if you told me that I would only hear the word "fasting". But Lent is very much like Advent, when we hear the "voice of one crying out in the desert, 'Make ye straight the paths of the Lord!'" It is a season of anticipation and preparation, during which our souls are cultivated by various practices to receive our God in greater fullness than before. And it is this preparation, this cultivation, that requires from us penance and self-denial. Penance and self-denial are not ends in themselves, but rather paths that leads us to happiness.

It is written in the heart of every man to long for God, and we spend our whole lives seeking for some permanent joy. Yet there is a great principle that we encounter every time seek for, or receive, some happiness or any good thing. I will call this the Principle of Displacement. Every time we attain joy, or are given some good gift, it is necessary that whatever stands in its way be removed, or we cannot receive these good things. We regularly see this principle at work in our every day lives. If we purchase a new and beautiful piece of furniture for our house, we must move or get rid of other things to create space for it. If a cup is full of water, it must be emptied before it can be filled with wine. Long ago, in Greece, Archimedes discovered this principle when his body displaced the water in his bath.

And so it is in our spiritual lives as well. Our souls are designed to contain the very God of Heaven and Earth, yet all too often, when He comes to us, we find that there is no room for Him, because our souls are cluttered with attachments and things of no account or little value. And so the sacrifices and losses of Lent are not a final desolation, but rather a spiritual house-cleaning that will enable us to receive our Divine Guest. The paths of the Lord are made straight, clutter is removed, and a dwelling place for God is made ready within us.

If we look at the great themes and symbols of the Lenten season we will see this principle at work over and over again. Every loss, every negative, either prepares for or ends in positive gain and Joy.

Ashes. We begin Lent with ashes, which call to our minds several associations. Throughout the text of Sacred Scripture we find ashes associated with penance and suffering, often connected with sackcloth. Consider the story of Jonah and the people of Ninevah, or the bitter plight of Job. Ashes also remind us of our mortality, and of their symbolic sibling dust. "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." "Remember, O man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." We are also reminded of the mortality, or transience, of the things of earth and of any of our works that do not have their root in God. See I Corinthians 3:12-15 where St. Paul reminds us that the works of wood, hay, and straw, will be burnt up. Yet the sufferings of Job ended in him receiving many times more than what he originally had, and with the gift of really seeing God for the first time. Death itself is closely related to life, and our Savior tells us that that unless a seed fall into the ground and die it will bear no fruit. St. Francis reminds us that "...it is in dying that we are born to eternal life". Penance itself draws our attention to sorrow and contrition, both of which may seem to us to be negative, but which are again only the other side of a very positive coin. Contrition is intimately related to love. The beginnings of real sorrow for our sins are simply signs that we have begun to truly love God at last. Penance, too, is a sign of something positive, that we desire to correct and repair the damage we have done through our sins.

Those who prepare as candidates or catechumens to enter the Church at Easter time may be aware of something else as well. The sacrament of Confirmation involves the pouring of oil upon the new convert's head and the tracing of the sign of the Cross. I still distinctly remember my own confirmation. I was first in the line of the other catechumens, awaiting the anointing with the perfumed oil. Since I was first, I suppose that Father hadn't gotten his "pour" exactly right yet, and he virtually dumped the blessed oil upon my head. As the sweet smelling olive oil ran down my head towards my eyes, a friend standing nearby handed me a handkerchief. I can tell you that the beautiful smell of that oil lingered long on that handkerchief, and I did not even want to wash my hair afterward. So the new converts to the Church may experience that their heads, once marked with ashes, are designed to receive the "oil of gladness" when Lent is done.

The forty days. The next great symbol, or theme, of Lent that we encounter is the forty days. The number forty is used on numerous memorable occasions in Scripture, and it usually also conveys certain negative associations. We remember the temptations and fasting of Jesus during His forty days in the wilderness directly after His baptism in the Jordan river. The flood rains fell upon the earth for forty days during the time of Noah, resulting in the destruction of all life that was not contained in the Ark. For forty years the Hebrew children wandered in the desert, trying to reach the land flowing with milk and honey. And Moses spent forty days of fasting upon Mount Sinai.

The results of these events are both significant and positive. We are granted strength through Christ's temptations; we see that He was succored by angels at the end; and immediately following those forty days He began His public ministry. The Flood purged the earth of its wickedness, and was followed by a great covenant between God and man. When the children of Israel left Egypt (that great Biblical symbol of the world) it took forty years of desert wandering to prepare them for their entrance to the Promised land. Many of them still longed for the "flesh-pots" of Egypt and loathed the heavenly manna. Through their time in the desert the congregation of Israel was purged of many of its rebellious and idolatrous members (much as we are internally during Lent), and their wanderings culminated in their admittance to the land promised to their fathers, which is a symbol of our own heavenly home. And finally, Moses returned from his long fast bearing the very laws of God in his hands, and his face shone with overwhelming glory from his long communion with the Divine. So we see that these times of suffering, destruction, and desert wandering were necessary preparations for doing the will of God (Christ's public ministry), for receiving a covenant (Noah), for entering our eternal home (the wandering of the Jews), and for communion with God and learning the will of God (Moses). No mean list of good results, these!

The Desert. But let us return briefly to a theme touched upon in the previous section. The time of Lent is often associated with the desert. The specific connection here is with Christ's forty days of fasting in the wilderness, and of the Hebrew children's forty years of desert wandering. Yet the great spiritual masters of both past and present refer to seasons of testing and spiritual dryness in the souls of individuals as "desert experiences". This is closely connected with the "dark night of the soul" described by St. John of the Cross. During these experiences, we are told by those who have trodden such paths, the soul experiences dryness, pain, lack of spiritual consolations, and feelings of abandonment. Yet all these things are designed to draw the soul away from its attachments to things of the world, and through emotional discomfort and perceived loneliness to rely on God utterly, and to live by the pure light of faith. The result of these experiences can lead to a union with God that is so profound and deep that it is described by the masters as a spiritual wedding or marriage. The soul becomes the spouse of God. No other love or affection is needed, no natural sight is desired-- only pure union with God and faith remain.

Nakedness. This is not a theme or symbol usually associated with Lent. Yet it is related to all that has been written so far, and is especially connected with the desert and dark night experiences. Through this time of Lent we see loss and self-denial. But we have also seen, through the Principle of Displacement, that the things we lose are lost only to make room for God, to prepare us for the great union of Love. As we are stripped of our sins and worldy affections we may come to a point of spiritual nakedness. This is not the nakedness of shame, nor the nakedness of our fallen nature that requires the white garments of Christ described in Sacred Scripture. No, this is a nakedness of simplicity, of removal of sin, of the tearing down of idols.

In all this world the greatest and most intimate form of natural human love is the love of a man and woman in marriage, which is consumated in the act of sexual union. We always associate sex with nakedness, and there is a reason. No union this intimate can exist as long as anything still stands between the two lovers. Man and wife come together not only physically naked, but with the nakedness of honesty, knowing and accepting each other with no walls and no separations. And so this natural nakedness which involves the removal of clothing can be seen as symbol of a spiritual nakedness, where all our pride, sin, pretences, and shame are stripped away, and the soul at last stands ready for the bliss of Divine Love in the most intimate union of man and God.

In closing, I would like to offer two quotes that describe this reality of nakedness and union. The first is taken from Francis Thompson's immortal poem, The Hound of Heaven, in which the poet finds himself stripped of everything he had sought that was not God. The second is taken from the great spiritual canticle of St. John of the Cross, in which he describes the blissful union of Love with God that follows the dark night of the soul.

"Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
                    And smitten me to my knee;
                I am defenseless utterly.
                I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep."

"All which I took from thee I did but take,
                Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.
                All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for the at home;
                Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

  Halts by me that footfall;
  Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
  "Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
  I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

"O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.

I remained, lost in oblivion; My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself, Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies."

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)

Let this then be our great prayer this Lent: that we leave the world and enter into the desolation of the desert in order to be made ready to enter Paradise; that ashes give way at last to the "oil of gladness"; and that our fasting and spiritual nakedness make way for the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb.