Ash Wednesday 2022

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Ash Wednesday by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

There’s an old story about the Sufi trickster/sage Nasruddin who is encountered by a disciple on his hands and knees under a streetlamp looking furiously for something in the gutter. 

“What are you looking for, Master?” the disciple asks. 

“My house keys.” 

“Where did you lose them?” 

“In my house.” 

“Then why are you looking for them under the streetlamp, Master?” 

“Because the light is better out here!”

We would do well, I think, amongst the bewailing of our sins and lamentation of Ash Wednesday, to be very clear as to the reason for our penitence; to be clear about what we are repenting of, what we are turning from and what we are turning towards, lest we inadvertently turn this day and the season of Lent into another opportunity to blast the trumpet, make a spectacle of our misery and woe and thus more firmly entrench ourselves in the very thing from which we seek to be free.

Thomas Keating was fond of reminding people that the spiritual journey is really all about dismantling the illusion that we are separate from God and changing the direction in which we search for happiness. Because we are made for union and communion with God, with the source of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness,  and because we come to full, reflective self-consciousness without a direct experience of God’s love, we quite naturally set off in search for what we think will complete us, make us whole. For some, it’s rising through the ranks of a business. Piling up accolade after accolade, accomplishment after accomplishment. For others, it’s seeking security through the accumulation of money. For still others, it’s ordering our lives in such a way that everything is safe, predictable, under control. There are probably as many different ways of engaging in this outward search as there are human beings. Whether through relationships, possessions, substances, or the accumulation of knowledge–we’re always looking for something to ease the sense of lack that creeps up on us when we’re sitting alone in our room with our unexamined thoughts.

In light of our story about Nasruddin, much of our life is spent looking in the wrong place for the peace that passes understanding. We look where we look simply because we’re conditioned to look there, and it’s never occurred to us that things could be any other way. What if Ash Wednesday is, at its essence, a reminder–an urgent, impassioned reminder–of where to look for the peace, happiness, and joy that has eluded us thus far? We like looking under the streetlamp because it’s convenient, and, let’s face it, easier. But Ash Wednesday reminds us that that is not where we lost our keys. True peace, happiness, joy, stability and equanimity beyond the inevitable chances and changes of this world is found in God and God alone. Peace is not an experience alongside myriad other experiences. It is the all-welcoming, all-embracing background that holds, that says, “Yes!” to life, even the hard parts. Seek the Lord, Isaiah sings, where the Lord wills to be found. For God alone my soul in silence waits.

The poet John Astin writes in his poem “Rich Beggars”:

We are like birds,

who flying through the air

keep asking:

“Where is the sky?”

Like fish,

who swimming 

in the watery depths

keep asking

“Where is the sea?”

Like kings,

who feasting

at the table of Life

keep asking,

“Where is 

the food?”

It is this predicament–searching for what has already been given to us freely in abundant supply (a good measure, pressed down, shaken together and put in your lap someone said somewhere)--that Ash Wednesday seeks to correct. 

In the words of St. Francis, “The one you are looking for is doing the looking.” Matthew’s Gospel tells us to go into our inner room–to rest, to simply be, as the Presence of the Great I Am, upon which all the experiences of our life–every perception, sensation, every thought, every emotion comes and goes. We come home to the One who has made his home in us. We fast from looking under the streetlamp for what we lost in the house. We fast from believing our stories of scarcity, lack, and not enough. And if we weep, mourn, and lament, it is weeping, mourning, and lamentation at having looked so long, and traveled so far for what was already here all along.

The effortlessness of simply being is the very poverty, the having nothing that opens onto possessing all, of which St. Paul writes in his Letter to the Corinthians. Make no mistake. For most of us, this is a kind of death and something we avoid at all costs. Do, do, do. Fix, fuss, fidget. Busy, busy, busy.Trumpet, trumpet, trumpet. Going into our inner room means fasting from all that for a few minutes each day. In letting-be–in stopping the manipulating, controlling, and judging of our experience, in learning to see our thoughts as just thoughts, tents we pitch to contain the ineffable and effervescent dance of God--we find ourselves increasingly “at home” in a placeless place we never really left. All our efforts to gain, to win, to achieve, to earn are revealed as, rather humorously, the very source of our perceived sense of lack: birds asking “Where is the sky?”; fish asking, “Where is the water?”; diners at a banquet asking, “Where is the food?” 

So Ash Wednesday, marking as it does our entrance into the season of Lent, opens onto the empty desert wilderness stripped of all the toys or props we normally use to distract us from the truth of who we really are. Ash Wednesday and Lent remind us that the outward search in power, possessions, and prestige always comes to dust. It leaves us with grief and pain for promised joy, as the Scottish poet Robert Burns writes. Moths and rust. Reminding ourselves that we are but dust, that everything around us is fleeting, passing, going away is stiff medicine to be sure, but it’s meant to turn us around, to wake us up to our wanderings in the far country among the pig pods, and draw us home, brings us back to ourselves, back to love. 

Lent, then, is a coming home in the most profound sense. A deep, clear, realization and manifestation for others–all others without exception–of the love that you are. Lent is a season of returning again again to the love that’s always already present and resting in that, as that. Lent is returning to the Love that’s beckoning, the Love that patiently and desirously waits, not to be earned like some grace carrot on the end of a stick of repentance, but recognized, received if we would but unclutch our dusty hands and find there, like a pearl of great price buried in the field of the heart, that which doesn’t come and go, that which doesn’t rust, that which doesn’t wither and fade. Take it up. Appreciate this precious opportunity to know yourself to be loved through and through, just as you are. And then let your cup overflow as that very love for others in the wilderness of this broken and hurting world: feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, the lonely, the widowed, the incarcerated. Be the very bread you receive at this table when you depart from this place.