More Reflections on Ash Wednesday

Return to me with your whole heart. That was the line from Joel 2:12 that I heard early Wednesday morning.

Your whole heart, I thought? What can that mean, when your heart is not whole?

My heart is shattered.

It lies in tiny shards all over the ground.

Its jagged pieces spin into space, floating past Jupiter like lost little pilgrims.

Its dusty bits float on the oceans, bits of ash, sparkling grimly in the sunlight and filtering slowly downward, into the darkness where oddly luminescent sea creatures chart paths we can barely imagine.

One might want to turn to God again. The word metanoia slides off the tongue. It sounds graceful, and hopeful. But if God's desire is for a whole heart, if one can turn toward God only with an intact heart, then one is surely lost.

Late last night I turned to the passage in another version. Return to me with all your heart. Of course, I had known, in some small and isolated portion of my mind, that "whole" meant "all." I had known that in my own broken heart the response to what seemed a play on words but was really a conundrum of translation reflected my own longing for wholeness.

Your heart. In Biblical Judaism, the seat of your being. The essence of who you are.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So end the readings for the day, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:21.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon about the treasure in the field. (The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has a lot to say.) The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Why does he purchase the entire field; why doesn't he just dig up the one section? The treasure, she concludes, is scattered in plain sight, glittering all over the field.

Your heart accompanies your treasure and so there it is,

strewn across the field, scattered across the universe, mixed with the salt of the sea.

Return to me with your whole heart.

Return to me with the gift of a heart so cracked open that that in its wholeness it encounters brokenness everywhere.

Return to me with all of your heart.

You will find its pieces in places to which you would never have sought to journey on your own.

It is, indeed, an appalling thing, the strange mercy of God.

Ash Wednesday, Late

Our service was beautiful. Somber. Almost ethereal.

But not, of course. Not ethereal. Our pastor burned a palm branch he had picked up on the Temple Mount two weeks ago.

And then I found that I could not receive ashes. I simply could not do it.

Because I have ashes. Upstairs in my house.

Ash Wednesday Prayer: Even Among These Rocks

VI.

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


(from T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Where Love Goes

You cannot conceive...nor can I or anyone -- the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

~ Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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Two writers, both of whom in their work explore that portion of the landscape of the Christian religion ignored by those who prefer to pass the whole thing off as a saccharine enterprise of love unadulterated by reality ~ I suppose it's time to stop dabbling and read their entire corpora of work.

The experience of the cross is a bitter and bleak one. The invitation to accompany Jesus there is a window into an unsettling and strangely brilliant universe.

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I am working hard on understatement here.

Perspective

I may have mentioned that I had a few medical tests a month ago.

I finally gave in and called for the results today. The doctor has to call tomorrow and tell me what I might do next, but the nurse read the report over the phone and spelled the big words and told me what they meant.

They didn't sound very exciting to me. They sounded like things that should probably be clarified sooner rather than later, and that might require some attention someday.

But I did look them up online. There were the usual medical board postings which included some slightly hysterical posts and some generally reassuring posts.

I find it difficult to churn up much interest in what any of it means.

Re-creation

Wayne has three friends who have recently suffered the deaths of young adult sons. I am one of those friends. He asked about the next one: should he share this blog with her? I told him to go ahead, but that he might want to mention it again in a few months, as she will probably remember little of what he says right now.

I leave out a lot, of course. This is only a little blog, and I write because writing is one way that I process things. But I don't want to scare people with the fierceness of grief. Someone commented on Kat's blog recently that she has never experienced a major loss. Oh, I thought to myself, she lives in such a different universe. When she sees the moon, or the sun, or a dragonfly, it looks completely different to her than it does to me.

I had known that before. My brother and I talked the other day about how our basic orientation, formed as the small survivors of the automobile accident that took the lives of others, is toward a universe of chaos and treachery. But the last months have been a reminder of just how much courage one needs to muster for the daily encounter.

I am rather musterless. I cannot listen to Vivaldi anymore. I tried Tschiakovsky's Fifth Symphony the other day ~ that's gone, too. At least as I used to understand it.

But (rousing myself again), I did think, after Wayne posted about the most recent death in his circle of friends, that I might share this. This has helped. A Jesuit friend sent me a bookmark a couple of weeks ago. The sculpture is The Creation of Adam, from the north portal of Chartres Cathedral (which he knows to be my favorite place). Think of your son resting on the knees of a loving God, he wrote. Another Jesuit looked at it and said, And you can also think of God re-creating your son. Yes, I said, that occurred to me, too.

You do not have to see it as the re-creation of a young man. You might see instead the re-creation of a young woman, or a baby girl, or a mother or a husband or a sister or an older parent ~ all of them represented by the links on my sidebar.

I don't know whether it helps. I don't pretend to know what might. But to does seem to me that the gentle caress of a loving and infinitely creative and hopeful God is a possible response to the chaos that threatens to engulf us. And so: the Chartres portrait, sculpted by an unknown artist 740 years ago. It's what I have to offer today.

Observations

I am down in the southwest corner of the state, where I have come for tomorrow's funeral for my second stepmother's mother. I'm in my brother's living room, using his laptop ~ awake, as usual, long after everyone else.

Earlier this evening I spent about an hour at the visitation. I had forgotten to take into account that it might be difficult to be in a funeral home.

Lots of family there, people I have known my entire life. I had also forgotten to take into account that everyone would look different to me than they did six months ago. It's not them, of course. It's my vision. It's like looking out at a world populated by aliens. But the alien, I suppose, is me.

It's hard to explain. But my entire orientation has shifted. I stood there making small talk with my lawyer uncle and his son, my lawyer cousin, about the worldwide economic situation, and my cousin acknowledged several times, in deference to my new reality, that we need to keep things in perspective. How would we do that? I wondered to myself. My half-brother is also a lawyer, and I am a lawyer. Maybe if we got all of us into one place, we could figure out what kind of perspective we should have.

After the funeral tomorrow there will be a Methodist church luncheon. The last time I went to an after-the-funeral-luncheon-in-a-rural-church was four years ago, after my third-stepmother died. The church ladies had produced dozens of the most amazing pies and cakes.

Banana cream pies after a funeral. I'm trying to figure out what that might mean. And also the economy. And death, the relentless predator.

I wonder how the people who survived the medieval plagues retained their sanity. I'm betting that it was an elusive commodity.