Grace Cathedral

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O God we are here. Speak to us and bring us back to life. Amen.

What if for a day we could see things as they really are?

As she was dying of cancer my friend Judy said to me, “Would you stay a little longer? I’m afraid.” And so I lingered there with her as the day slipped away into night. All her life she had been in control, so competent, so accomplished, so brave – always knowing what to do. But at that moment all that she had left was just to be, to be herself, to be in the presence of God. Together we experienced the gift of each other and of seeing things as they really are.[1]

Today on Ash Wednesday we step out of the busyness of our lives. The reality of sin confronts us. Engulfed by the most dramatic political changes in our life we come to this sanctuary. We hear the truth that we too will die. And yet to quote Theresa of Avila, “The feeling remains that God is on the journey too.”[2] In the Book of Matthew Jesus says, “And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Mt. 28:20).

Not long after she got pregnant in high school, a friend who I’m going to call Eleanor, married her husband. He went to seminary, became the pastor of a church and for ten years they had a happy marriage as she raised their two small children. But by her late twenties she needed more. She wanted to go to college. She simply could not, “live as [she] had lived, trying to please” everyone. Because of this and although she did not want it, her husband divorced her.[3]

She decided to have nothing to do with the divorce. She didn’t hire a lawyer or go to court. The evening the divorce was granted her ex-husband called to tell her from a bar with party noises in the background. She said, “I felt excluded from all the world’s pleasure and fun.” For a year she felt excruciating pain. For her it was like dying.

During this time Eleanor memorized this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke which imagines the voice of a person on the other side of death’s gate. The poem goes like this.

“Granted, it’s strange to dwell on earth no more, to give up customs one barely had time to learn, not to give roses and other things of such promise a meaning in some human future; to stop being what one was in endlessly anxious hands, and ignore even one’s own name like a broken toy.”

“Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange, to see all that was once so interconnected drifting in space. And death exacts a labor, a long finishing of things half-done, before one has that first feeling of eternity.— Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.”[4]

Eleanor had lost her name. What seemed to have meaning no longer did and all that had been so interconnected was drifting in space. In her journal she asked herself, “When will… love be a freeing and not a binding? Haven’t we been taught about love exactly backwards, so that we think ourselves engaged in “self-giving love,” when we have as yet, no self to give, when we are still carrying our needs about looking for someone who will take responsibility for one or two of them?”

This difficult time felt like a kind of death. But looking back Eleanor learned a few things. First she realized the importance of separating what she called false guilt from true guilt. False guilt arises from not recognizing that there were circumstances that were not under her control. There were things she could not have done any differently. She was not the only influence on how events turned out.

What she called true guilt on the other hand came out of her own distraction, inattentiveness and poor judgment. Eleanor realized that strength is a choice. “It is not that one simply is strong or weak in particular circumstances: one can choose to be strong.”

Eleanor read a novel with these lines in it. “How does one apologize for being a failure? When it’s so pointless, so redundant. When might a human being reasonably be allowed to forego “I’m sorry,” and say only to another human being, leaping past apology like an arrow, “Forgive me. I loved you.””[5]

What if for a day we came to see things as they really are? Our society fears death and constantly avoids even mentioning it. The repeated messages we hear assert that if we just apply the right skin care products, eat healthy foods and exercise relentlessly then we may even live forever.

I love Ash Wednesday because I care about the truth. It’s a relief to be honest and remember that we are from the dust and to dust we shall return. Being frank about our mortality allows us to admit that God is God and I am not God. On this day we can set aside the fantasy that we are competent and can control our life. We can put down that heavy burden. We can awake from the false dream that we somehow stand apart from the brokenness of the world. We can enter the mystery of Christ.

On Ash Wednesday we say out loud how we have fallen short. We put into words the otherwise abstract idea that we are dying. We wear ashes as a symbol to make our own mortality real to us.

Doing this gives us a freedom. We will not last forever and if we do not realize this we will miss the miraculous beauty of the gifts we receive each day. We will be blind to the grace that we are to each other. We will not see the beauty that we experience even in brokenness.

What if for a day we came to see things as they really are? The Trappist Monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) wondered if there were twenty such people in the world. He described them as people “who [are] free, who [are] not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God…”[6]

My friend Eleanor really sees. One night during that terrible year of her divorce she was putting her eleven year old daughter to bed when the girl said to her, “Why don’t you sleep with me tonight, or lie with me for a while now and I’ll put my arms around you and love you?”

Eleanor could not do this. She went upstairs to study, feeling painfully cold and alone, focused on not having a man. Then she realized how silly this was. She was choosing to be unhappy and isolated, insisting on the kind of person who could love her, when God was offering just what she needed. She switched off the light, went down and got in bed with her daughter and cried while she held her “warm and gentle.”

These days I have been thinking a lot about Judy and Eleanor and about you too. It is “[s]trange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange, to see all that was once so interconnected drifting in space.” And yet through our suffering Jesus promises to be with us even to the end of the age. This Ash Wednesday let us gratefully receive what God is giving us. May we come to see things as they really are.

[1] In particular during her last months, Judy talked to me a lot about forgiveness. Mem. Judy Hallagan (12-7-14).

[2] Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) 22.

[3] Margaret Ruth Miles, Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011) 85-98.

[4] Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,” The Duino Elegies. This is a combination of various translations including the one by Stephen Mitchell and the one that appears in Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024) 213.

[5] Mylene Dressler, The Deadwood Beetle: A Novel, 68.

[6] [T]hat would mean that there were twenty [people] who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.” Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions, 1961) 203.