Fasting From All That is Not Our Belovedness - Ash Wednesday 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Ash Wednesday, February 22, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

As we enter into the Great Forty Days of Lent that culminate in our journey with Jesus to the cross during Holy Week, and through the cross in the Great Light of Easter, and the shedding abroad, bodying forth, of that light in the Feast of Pentecost, I want to ponder how we might use these days together as a community. In the spirit of Ash Wednesday, it’s important to remember that we never actually know how many of these we have. This very day last year, in fact, we lost Michelle’s dad (Nora’s husband, my best friend, our kids’ “poppa”), so there’s a particularly sharp, still painful, poignancy to this day for us. A reminder of how our days are indeed like grass… we flourish like a flower of the field and when the wind goes over it… it is gone.” Not gone forever. Not lost (nothing is ever lost in the economy of God’s love). But the tender ache of those we love, but see no longer. How preciously fleeting. How fragile and unrepeatable. How wondrous this thing we call human life. Oh, that we might truly appreciate it, that we might live a life that is truly life. 

And how easy it is, actually, to mechanically and automatically devote ourselves to habits of heart, mind, and body that blind us to living in the mystery of God in whom we live and move and have our being. How easy it is to practice distraction, contraction, and separation. How easy it is when the breezy wind of the Always-Walking-By One tickles the hairs at the nape of our neck, or tugs at our sleeve, to not even notice and return to mending our nets in the illusory safety of our comfortable boats with the family name “Sons of Thunder Fishing Company Ltd.” freshly painted on the bow. Lent is a time when we get to see where we are planted. By streams of living water, rooted and grounded in the peace, freedom, and poured-out-for-others life of the Risen Christ closer to us than our jugular, or somewhere else?

During Lent, the Church invites us to adopt certain habits of body, mind, spirit in order to see clearly where we’re stuck, open ourselves to the healing presence and action of God in our lives, and then go with Jesus to those left in the ditch others as the very love we’ve received. It’s very easy for Lenten disciplines to shade into rather innocuous, apparently pious, activities that have little effect on drawing us closer to the love of God, healing us from our hurts and woundedness, and sending us out as repairers of the breach in world riven with dehumanizing inequality. I think of the “giving up sweets for Lent,” that was popular when I was growing up. Our dentist (Dr. Bilkay) hated it. We avoided some cavities, perhaps, but did it wake us to all that blocks the receiving of God’s unconditional love in our hearts? Did forgoing the box of Turtles open us to the healing and transformation of our woundedness and alienation from God as the Ground of Being? Did it open our eyes to the splendors of creation, and help us see the faces of the poor? Did it deepen our relationship with God and move us from acquaintanceship, to friendliness, to friendship, to intimacy, to union and communion with the Living God whose deepest desire is to love us into loving others? Probably not.

Fasting can take various forms, and most of them have little to do with how much or how little you eat. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity has that lovely counsel, “Let yourself be loved.” For the Carmelites, the path of discipleship is really all about recognizing that the God we seek, is always already seeking us. It starts, rightly, with desire. Not our desire for God, but God’s desire for us. “No matter how much you think you are searching for God,” says St. John of the Cross, “he is searching for you much more.” Fasting in this picture is something more akin to stopping the outward search for what is already poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. It’s a recognition of what is already the case, more than an acquisition of something we lack. Fasting in this picture is first of all noticing all the different ways we litanize fear, scarcity, and lack in ourselves. All the ways we see the world through the story of not enough, and something missing–a day late and dollar short orientation to life where the happiness for which we are made is over the next hill, around the next bend, on a distant, ever-receding horizon…. But never here as what de Caussade calls, “the sacrament of the present moment.”

So we notice these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves (“I’m a failure,” “I’m unlovable,” “I’m broken, dirty, warped to the core”). We notice the stories we tell ourselves about others, and the stories we tell ourselves about God (“Big Meanie Stalin God Just Waiting to Send you to the Gulag for Eternity.”) We take an honest look and see what tape-loops are running the show. We just notice. And in the noticing we also notice the suffering and self-enclosure these believed tape-loops bring with them: hunched shoulders, furrowed brows, balled fists, clenched jaws and all kinds of different physical, spiritual, and mental afflictions. We notice all this, and with gentle, loving, curiosity, let them come undone in love. We make a little space for the truth of who we are– “people crowned with mercy and loving kindness” as the Psalmist puts it–to wash over us, to burble up as from an unstopped well, and irrigate the parched places. Fasting from fear, scarcity and lack, dis-identifying from our thoughts and stories, (“shutting the door” in Matthew’s language) we gradually let ourselves be loved. We make a little space for God to get at us and let God’s healing love do the rest…. Hinni. Here I am, Lord. Into your hands I commend my Spirit.

Lenten disciplines are a little like playing with fire. We need supervision and counsel. Why? Because it’s very easy to use some traditionally-sanctioned ascetical practices to reinforce deeply ingrained (and often unconscious) habits of self-hate. We hate our body, so in the name of “being spiritual” we fast so that God (who we think also hates our body like we do) will love us. We hate our anger and try to expel it hatefully and only become more practiced in hate in the process. The criteria has always to be: how does this practice, this habit of heart, this spiritual discipline open me to receiving more deeply God’s love? How is it helping me recognize, marinate, and stabilize in the belovedness that is the pulsing heart of all creation? How is it opening my eyes to the suffering of others towards whom the winds of grace and love always blow us? If it doesn’t do these things, don’t do it! 

One Lent, I even had a spiritual director who actually told me to stop praying all together and eat ice cream every night. I was so wrapped up in trying to earn God’s love, and make myself acceptable in God’s sight, that the only recourse was to drop it all. I actually gained weight for the first time, and when I returned to prayer forty days later, it was with a sense of enjoying the God whose only desire was to love me into loving others. I had to notice and fast from an image of a God inherited from parents, teachers, and church, that was unhealthy, destructive, and (particularly for me) very, very dangerous. Willfulness and effortful striving yielded to effortless willingness to open to Jesus who was always already there–a gentled receptivity born of letting myself be loved, rather than trying to make myself lovable in the eyes of some always disapproving, judgemental parent God prone to fits of pique.

There’s an old cliche that goes, “Hurt people hurt people.” Lent has to, first of all, be a time of healing, so that we can be of real, self-forgetful service to others. Because the opposite of, “Hurt people hurt people,” is, “Healed people heal people. Loved people love people.Transformed people transform people.” When we recognize, open to, marinate and stablize in the belovedness that is literally dying to get at us, we cannot help but go as a sent people with love on our lips, help in our hands, breach-mending blessing, healing, and reconciliation pouring out of us like they pour out of Jesus–as water to wash, bread to feed, oil to heal, and wine to slake the thirst of the thirsty.

Social justice is the natural fruit of transformative encounter with the Living God. We fast from all that is not God’s love for us (presenting ourselves just as we are to God just as God is) and become bearers (Theotokos) in clay jars of that same love which we pour out (in often hidden ways) for others. With dear Paul, we acquaint ourselves with being little (open and receptive to God’s presence and action in our lives), being poor (rich in God’s work in us and not with our own agenda-driven efforts), having nothing, and being an open place where God can happen. When we cease pointing to accusing finger and see the problem is mostly with the log in our own eye: God happens. When we see that we have enough and share from our abundance: God happens.  When we wake up to the belovedness that is who we are and realize this is the belovedness of each and every person regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity: God happens.

We worry less about what others aren’t doing, and concentrate on what we’re doing, what God is doing through us. We discover that we are God’s field, God’s building, a place and an activity where the new song of God in Christ is sung through us as (usually) little acts of loving attention many times. And if even we can’t do very much–even if, in fact, our circumstances mean that all we can do is lie down and do nothing–we do that gallantly in the trust that in some hidden way that doesn’t register on the bean-counter’s abacus, or the virtue watchdog’s scorecard: God is happening through us for others. 

Fast from all that is not  your belovedness of God: just-as-you-are,  crowned-with mercy-and-loving-kindness. Pray by making room for God to water your parched places. Gently shut the door on stories of fear, scarcity, and lack and let them come undone. May a new and contrite heart, an undefended heart without edges or boundaries be fashioned in you. And may you, with eyes washed clean by love’s tincture, be awake to the ways you might repair the breach between haves and have-nots, those on top and those on the bottom, insiders and outsiders: hide not yourself from your own kin. Their cries are what we hear when our trumpets stop sounding and our ears are opened by the great wide-openness of God.