At church today, the sermon was on healing fractured relationships. We need to go deep into the heart of these rifts, said our interim rector, describing the work of repair as something that needed to be both thoughtful and delicate. It was a good sermon, and hit close enough to home that I was joking with some friends afterward that I felt rather personally called out by it. I was actually a little reassured to hear a few other people share similar thoughts. I doubt any of us are not struggling with fractured relationships in some context.
The Ash Wednesday liturgy has a long list of confessions. It’s the part of the service that seems to always leave me feeling the most shaken, and sometimes quite emotional. The words are just too true. “We have not loved you . . . We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves . . . We have not forgiven . . . We have been deaf to your call to serve . . . the pride, hypocrisy, and impatience of our lives . . . our anger at our own frustration . . . our blindness to human need and suffering . . .” There’s an awful lot in it, and a lot that is awful. I find Ash Wednesday services deeply moving and powerful, but never really comfortable. “Remember that you are dust,” they say as they trace the cross made of ashes on your forehead, “and to dust you will return.” The ashes are made from burning the palms from Palm Sunday the previous year. They make me think about human fickleness: palms waved in welcome by crowds who soon be calling “crucify him.” They make me think of charred hopes, of aspirations ground to dust. It is a sobering reminder.
But the liturgy starts out with a collect which begins, “Almighty God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent.” That line stays with me. “You hate nothing you have made.” I think of of a sermon I heard maybe a year ago from our last rector, who was encouraging us to bring our whole selves when we come up to the altar. Even the parts we most hate. Maybe especially the parts we most hate. “There is no part of you that God does not love,” he said, and that comment struck me as so completely, absurdly unbelievable that I keep coming back to it. Do I believe in a God who hates nothing that she has made? Do I dare to hope for that?
Lent is of course a call to serious self-reflection and an attitude of penitence. But it is not a call to self-hate or despair. Kneeling at church this Ash Wednesday, I kept thinking about the point that so many Christian thinkers have made over the years: it is encountering the love of God that frees you to look honestly at the sin in your life. Because if you start with the premise of that love, if you are first grounded in that connection to God, the recognition of sin loses its ability to spark fear that you are cut off, or to drag you down into hopelessness. The standard evangelical formula is to bring people into awareness of their own wretched sinfulness and then proclaim the Good News of redemption, but I think in my own life the reverse order has been more effective. I am too prone, I think, to get trapped in the awareness of my exceeding sinfulness and dismiss the Good News as nothing more than Fake News. I need to start somewhere else.
I struggle a lot with resentment, with a tendency to endlessly ruminate when I am angry, to hold grudges. Sometimes I relish mulling over the wrongs done to me, but sometimes I am so tired of my mind going in circles reviewing the finer points of why other people are wrong and I am right that I actually feel somewhat desperate to make it stop. I had one of those totally out of the blue experiences recently where I was deeply reminded of the reality of God’s love, reminded that my baptismal commitment was to keep letting that love into my life. And I noticed that while I was feeling that, the resentment and rumination just kind of faded away. It seems so oversimplistic to say that love is the answer to this problem, and yet I also think maybe it is. My therapist regularly reminds me that the ability to experience love, to let it in, is a muscle to be developed, that it’s something that takes time and practice. I don’t think you can force those kinds of experiences, but maybe you can practice being open to them. You can practice being quiet, and listening, and being present to what is there.
I have spent much of my adult life studying the theology of grace precisely because I have personally struggled so much to have a real sense of it. I am obviously not the first person to ask, how do you find a gracious God in the midst of sin? But I think it too must be something you practice again and again and again. I know all too well the experience of feeling estranged and deeply alienated from a God who I imagine no longer wants anything to do with me because I am too horrible. And perhaps the belief I have spent the most time trying to re-wire in my brain is a shift from a God who is easily offended and can’t tolerate the presence of sinners, to a God who is always there. Always. Who never gives up. I’ve had to un-learn the idea that I have to coax God back after I’ve messed up, whether through pleading or penance or virtuous acts or meeting a quota of suffering, and instead develop the faith to reach out to a God who never left.
On a recent difficult night, as I was having familiar doubts about whether God would even want anything to do with me given so many things, I kept coming back to that moment after I was baptized, when in the Episcopal liturgy they use Chrism to mark a cross on your forehead and say, “you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” The sheer power of the ritual took me aback; it hit home to me in a way that maybe it never had before, at least not as forcefully, that this relationship has staying power because God is all in, because God is committing to it, and (unlike fickle me), God can be trusted to stick with that promise. And at least on this particular tumultuous night, I chose to lean into that. I chose to resist the temptation to hurt myself or to eliminate ambiguity by collapsing everything into despair, as I all too often do. I got out my Book of Common Prayer and read through a lot of liturgy that I wasn’t sure I believed. But saying the familiar words was surprisingly grounding. The image that comes to mind is that of praying in the dark. Praying with the uncertainty, and with the fear, and with all the hard feelings. Having faith in a God who really can handle the entire range of human experience, who will not be scared away or offended by it. I think maybe that’s one of the things I want to work on this Lent, to keep taking small steps in that direction. To keep giving that God a chance.
The message I seem to keep hearing lately is that God’s profound desire is to heal broken relationships—whether the ones we have with each other, or the ones we have with God. I feel so much brokenness so regularly in both of those areas. It seems like an enormous, impossible task. But I am reassured to remember that this is in fact God’s work, not simply a human endeavor, and that it is a call to us as a community as well as individuals. That we are not alone. I am highly prone to anxiety. With a lot of situations, the darkness feels so pervasive and so thick that I’m not sure how much hope I can muster that anything will change. But perhaps I can nonetheless continue to pray in the dark.
Thanks for sharing this, Lynnette. This is kind of random, but the idea of praying in the dark reminds me of the line from the movie Gravity, where Sandra Bullock’s character loses the ability to receive messages from the ground, but still continues to transmit to them, in the hopes that somebody is listening. “Houston in the blind,” she says over and over, reminding them that she can’t hear anything they say in response. It’s not quite the same thing, but it seems similar–the idea of reaching out for a connection when you don’t know, but you hope that there’s somebody who can help on the other end.
I so appreciate you sharing your thoughts and journey. Your insights help to shift my perspective on several of my own similar struggles.
Ziff, I really like that image. Reaching out and hoping that someone is listening, even if you can’t hear them back.
SD, thank you. It means a lot to hear that.