3/5 Lectionary Meditation: Dust & Breath
Texts:
Perhaps you remember singing the nursery rhyme as a child, "Ring Around the Rosy." We held hands and danced in a circle, shouting at the tops of our lungs:
Ring around the rosy,
Pockets full of posey,
Ashes, ashes,
We all fall down!
It's a strange childhood game when we consider the rhyme's origins. In the 17th century, England was hit by the Bubonic Plague. "A ring around the rosy" or a red circular rash was the first sign of infection. Believing that the disease was transferred by smell, but also to counteract the literal stench of death, people carried sweet-smelling herbs or "posey" in their pockets. Unfortunately, before the great fire of 1666 killed the rats who were carrying the disease, the plague caused the deaths of 3 out of 5 people, and their bodies literally fell down into ashes. Or rather, if we understand God's creation of humanity out of dust and breath, their bodies returned to ashes.
I begin this morning at the beginning—the beginning of human life and the beginning of Jesus' ministry as a human being—in the hope that we can discover what these stories may have to offer us as people at the beginning of this year's Lenten journey.
The nature of human life commonly understood since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers is that we are composed of two parts: a body and a soul. According to this philosophy, the soul is the higher part of ourselves that we must seek to nurture and gratify, while the desires of the body are to be contained and despised. However, the story of God's creation of Adam provides a very different model from this body/soul dichotomy—one that I believe is closer to what we know about ourselves from our experience as human beings. The equation in Genesis is not body + soul = human; rather, the equation is dust + breath = soul[1]. To know fully who we were created to be, we must reconcile ourselves with both our dust and breath qualities, and we'll explore each of these in turn.
The ritual of Ash Wednesday—placing a cross of ashes on the forehead—reminds us of our dusty origins. The imposition of ashes is accompanied by a sobering reminder: "From dust you were created; to dust you shall return." In this ritual, we remember one of our names, that of finite mammal destined to die. A Byzantine funeral liturgy connects the imagery of ashes and dust with death with the words:
Come, brothers and sisters, let us consider the dust and ashes of which we were formed. What is the reality of our present life and what shall we become tomorrow? In death where is the poor and where the rich? Where is the slave and the master? They are all ashes.[2]
The ritual reminder of Ash Wednesday initiates the season of Lent, forty days in the wilderness of self-examination, stripping away illusions until we rediscover the core of who we are in God. With this process comes the risk of pain and doubt—we have to face the darkest, scariest parts of who we are in order to engage the things that turn our faces away from God.
The discipline of Lent, like Jesus' fast in the wilderness, would crush our spirits if our dust contained no breath. Thankfully, our "breath" heritage is named in another ritual of the Church: baptism. Baptism names our identity as beings who receive the breath of life from God, the first Parent of all humanity. In baptism, we acknowledge our identity as beloved children of God. We claim our spirit-filled nature. And it is this knowing ourselves as beloved children of God that empowers us to examine the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves during Lent or during any period of intense isolation and suffering.
It is appropriate that Mark's account of Jesus' time in the wilderness is preceded by an account of his baptism. What we hear the voice of the Eternal revealing to Jesus here is the same assurance we receive as heirs of the Kingdom: "You are my [child], the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased." It pleased God to claim Christ and it pleases God to claim us. This pronouncement empowers us for what comes next.
Even with that glorious baptism, the Spirit was not finished preparing Jesus for ministry. Imagine Jesus rising out of the waters of the Jordan River, affirmed in his identity as the beloved child of God and soaking wet. Immediately, without warning, the Spirit "[drives] him out into the wilderness"—from the hospitable environment of the dove to the hostile environment of the scorpion, from the life-giving waters to the dry isolation of the desert. It's as if Jesus must learn, now that he's assured of his identity as God's son, how to wrestle with his identity as a human being who is vulnerable to temptation. He must face his own darkness before engaging in the task of calling others to repentance.
As the Spirit was not satisfied to send Jesus straight from baptism into proclaiming the good news, neither should we be satisfied to claim our breath identity without wrestling with our dust. We must follow Jesus into the desert to discover our mortality, our temptations, our drought. Though this process can be uncomfortable and painful, it is necessary, and we enter in the hope that God will "attend to" us there. We tend to experience the most growth during these painful desert moments of our lives because, in fully confronting our weakness, we are most open to change.
While such self-examination should be, and often is, a part of daily life, Lent allows time for a special focus on this task and we model Jesus' fast in the desert in various ways. The answer to the question of what is usurping our primary identity is different for all of us. For my husband and I, the answer this year is work. We have committed not to work after 7 at night during the forty days of Lent, because we needed space to remember and embody the fact that good work goes on in the world without us. We need to re-discover our identity as Sabbath people. I've talked with others who are engaging in such disciplines as refraining from cynicism or creating a funeral plan. One friend is even giving up Lent for Lent, which reflects a realization of her limitations during a period of both busyness and sorrow in her life.
This year, I'm coming to understand the ways in which Lent is actually permission-granting, rather than permission-restricting. Lent frees us to look at ourselves with clarity and begin to understand the secondary identities that have eclipsed our knowledge of ourselves as breath and dust. Hence, my decision to not work after 7pm takes on the character of something I have the freedom and privilege to do, rather than something I must do out of obligation. Father James Martin explained on a recent radio program[3] that
Lent isn't simply about sacrifice. It is primarily a time to spiritually prepare one's self for Easter. And this may have less to do with not doing something than with doing something.
Lent is not a time to will ourselves to righteousness or to engage in games of prohibition that ease our guilt about unmet goals; rather, it is a time to enter the darkness of our hearts in the hope that the light of God will come back into focus.
Our Lenten journey, like the journey of Jesus in the desert, is prompted by the Spirit. Jesus did not decide for himself that a forty-day fast was just what he needed. Rather, he responded to the movement of the Spirit, who "drove him out into the wilderness." And so we must ask ourselves, before setting our own arbitrary goals for Lenten observance, what the Spirit is prompting us to do. Even though an examination of individual self is central to Lenten discipline, the self is still a member of the whole body of believers and we do well to commune with the Spirit to determine what sort of discipline would be most appropriate. And if the Spirit is hidden, which is often the case, we can also turn to the trusted community around us. Father Martin tells of arguing in college about the validity of Lenten discipline with his Jewish roommates, who believed that choosing a discipline for one's self was too easy. His friends eventually resolved the dispute by determining that they should choose what Father Martin should give up for Lent. Twenty years later, he still receives a call every Ash Wednesday with a pronouncement about what the season's discipline will be. Silly as it may seem, Father Martin's story pinpoints the fact that engaging in a Lenten discipline is not an act of willpower, but an act of obedience.
In baptism, as in Ash Wednesday, we are named. Forty days in the desert helps us remember and reconcile our names—dusty, mortal child of earth and spirit-filled, eternal child of God—replenishing the soul for the Good News of Easter: that suffering will not last. Death will die. The repentance Jesus calls us to is not an act of willpower, but a turning toward a whole new understanding of who we are in God. Jesus could scarce proclaim such good news about the reality of being human in God without engaging his own vulnerability and darkness in the desert. Likewise, our own repentance and proclamation can only be approached through the desert of self-knowledge and suffering. If we say we have no desert to cross in our journey toward God, we are spiritual infants for whom the resurrection holds no real hope. For what need do we have of the transformative power of sacrificial love if we have no sense of needing transformation?
In closing, I offer a poem by Madeleine L'Engle. Listen for the journey she takes in these few lines through the broken and confessing experience of the desert to a transformed and reconciled Easter creation:
O God, within this strange and quickened dust
The beating heart controls the coursing blood
In discipline that holds in check the flood
But cannot stem corrosion and dark rust.
In flesh's solitude I count it blest
That only you, my Lord, can see my heart
With passion's desires tearing it apart
With storms of self, and tempests of unrest.
But your love breaks through blackness, bursts with light;
We separate ourselves, but you rebind
In Dayspring all our fragments; body, mind,
And spirit join, unite against the night.
Healed by your love, corruption and decay
Are turned, and whole, we greet the light of day. [4]
May the Spirit inspire courage within us during this season of Lent to enter into the deepest dusty wilderness of our own hearts to emerge from the desert thirsting for the mysterious refreshment of the resurrection. May we live into our identity as living souls of dust and breath, eager to be reconciled and transformed.
[1] Wendell Berry, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (Pantheon, 1992), p. 106.
[2] J. Raya and J. de Vinck, "Verses During the Last Kiss: Funeral of the Dead" in Byzantine Daily Worship (Alleluia Press, 1988).
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5238122
[4] Glimpses of Grace (HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), p. 72.