Ash Wednesday

T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday” has been difficult for me to understand since I first read it many years ago, but it contains some lines which may be useful for our Lenten observances. First, some excellent practical advice, addressed as a request to God: “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still.” Superficially we may dismiss the advice as nonsensical, but it is wise.  For all who help to care for other human beings, it is essential to learn to care well, and “not to care,” that is, to be emotionally detached and calm, rather than obsessively and emotionally involved. A care-giver who does not learn and practice “caring and not caring” becomes of little use to himself, and to those for whom he or she should genuinely be caring. This advice applies to parents, who all-too-often do not know when to “let go and let God,” who insist that they hover around and in effect control their children. (These are the infamous “helicopter parents,” who can be a real challenge for teachers.)  As for “Teach us to sit still,” it is difficult to imagine a better request for a Lenten exercise. Just to sit still, without noise, without chatter, without TV or iPads and so on, without chattering at God as if He does not know what is truly for our good… “Be still and know that I AM God.” Another understandable and profound line from Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” pertains to the nature of our human existence: “This is the time of tension between dying and birth.” We exist in-between time and eternity, between attached love of self and selfless love of God and neighbor, between good and evil. Our lives unfold in the tension between, not simply on earth, and not in an imagined realm called “heaven.” And note that Eliot describes this “time of tension” as “between dying and birth,” which indicates the kind of dying and the kind of birth he has in mind. He is not thinking of mere biological birth and death, but of dying to ourselves and living to God and to others. We must first die to undergo a greater birth. The only way truly to be alive is to die to all in ourselves that is not from God, or in accord with God’s holiness, God’s will. We have a choice: die now, or die later. For those who practice living as a process of dying to their own wishes and wills in many ways, the last moments of life here are not a shock, but that for which one has been preparing. For those who live enmeshed in the passing moments, always thinking of “fun” and “what’s exciting,” when our time comes to pass out of this physical world, we are not ready. Unless we practice letting go of self in its various forms now, how do we expect to see and to love the “face of God” beyond death? Lent is what we make of it. At its best, I believe, Lent can be a journey from death-in-self into life-in-union-with-God. This process is not automatic, but costs us “nothing less than everything,” to borrow another line from Eliot. In the profoundly true words of the Apostle Paul, “Now I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Life and death are contending. What is deadly and kills the spirit often appears to be life; and what we think of as death may in truth be a sharing in real life. We are between death and life. Which do we choose?