It's Ash Wednesday - So What's Burning?

 

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday.
“Remember that you are but dust and unto dust you shall return.”

The celebrant rubs ashes on our forehead and we are supposed to be reminded of our sins and that we will, like it or not, eventually die. With that in mind, we then enter into six weeks of reflection that’s often marked by giving something up, or sometimes taking up a new practice intended to bring us closer to God, and these are good things. Often, however, if we’re honest, it’s just another season in the church marked by different colors, different customs, different routines and not much else.

The dust thing is interesting, though. In this context, dust means two things. The first is the dirt that God took up to make the first human being. So dust means dirt, but here it also means ashes, the grit and fluff that's left over when something is burned. Here, what's burned is supposed to be us and the dust referred to is connected with feelings of disappointment or disillusionment and with the ancient practice of visible humility. Job threw ashes on himself when his family had all been struck down. It is a symbol of great mourning, often intensified by the wearing of sackcloth, an intentionally uncomfortable, scratchy garment made of goat’s hair supposed to remind the wearer of their sins. It was painful on purpose. Sackcloth and ashes. 

But there is another recurring theme in the Bible connected with this practice, the idea of dying, specifically dying to self. Burning is a particularly final way of ending something. What is burned is pretty much completely destroyed and along with our former sinful ways, we are encouraged to not only get rid of our wrongful deeds, we are supposed to get rid of everything - EVERYTHING - that separates us from God and, contrary to what some say, it's not only sin that does this. 

In addition to what we do that we know is wrong when we do it, although this is a big obvious roadblock to a life with God, we also have to understand what we did in ignorance that we should not have done. If I think the speed limit is 50 but it's 35, the policeman still gets to give me a ticket for going too fast. Ignorance is not an excuse. Not really a sin, but still not OK. The attachments we form with other people that loom larger than God. A degree of busyness that gets in the way of our devotional life. Desire and addiction of almost any kind. We lose our focus and as a consequence, we lose God. 

So, what's burning is us? Our ego.  Whatever part of our humanity that interferes with the narrow way. That's why it's narrow. Not because it's exclusive, but because it's hard and takes work. However, we are a New Testament people, forgiven in Christ. We don’t put on sackcloth and ashes anymore, but there is symbolism here that can be useful to us, too. Rather than concentrating on our sins, we look to our transformation in Christ. The dust and ashes, the knowledge of all the times we have fallen short and need forgiveness is still important, but not for its sense of loss or hopelessness. We bury our old lives, yes, but as we do so we look to the new one. We die to something we thought we loved for the sake of something better so that we can embrace a newer life, a more perfect life in God. There is Lent, but there is also Easter. 

image: Vecteezy

The Arrow vs. the Circle - The Shape of the World

 One of the most enduring ideas I learned in college is that not everyone thinks like I do. 

It's true. And in all likelihood, they don't think like you do, either. This goes way past contemporary journalistic and talk show fodder about a divided country or prevailing politics. It goes all the way down to the how we think the world is made and the way it works beyond physics and biochemistry. It's about the nature of living things and, adjunctly, what we can expect or not expect in the process of living. Overall, there are two basic ideologies that not only dictate how we live, but they also dictate how we think.

The Arrow

The first way of looking at the world is as a straight line. Having a specific beginning and a specific ending, this view is most common in Western cultures (eg: ours) and most often coupled with a world governed by duality. That is, this world knows two opposing forces, each one working against the other to cause tension in our everyday lives. Right and wrong, good and evil, constantly at war with each other to the point that  determining one from the other and choosing rightly so as to live as decent a life as we can muster occupies a great deal of our time. 

In this scheme, whatever we consider bad is to be avoided at almost all costs. Poverty, illness, danger. We assume that it's possible to live a life with less bad and more good, not only through what we do ourselves, but overall  - as a group or society - and part of our job as humans is to tip the balance toward the good whenever we have a chance. Whether or not we think that goodness will alter a fate that extends beyond our physical life or not, this trend toward goodness is something to be desired and if our beliefs tend in the direction of a heaven, well then, there is an opportunity for all goodness to be realized.

The Circle 

Known as yin-yang, this is an Eastern or Asian view of the world in which all things in the universe consist of complementary, opposing forces in constant flux. These forces are unavoidable and interdependent, that is, one cannot exist without the other so that good and evil operate together necessarily and are not usually associated with  the same intensity of value judgement as they do in the Arrow model. 

This model also does not have any definite beginning or end. There is no Garden of Eden here, no Second Coming. The cycle, samsara, simply repeats until the individual gradually navigates their way into perfect communion with an awareness free from all suffering. That communion, that place of liberation, is called Nirvana and is reached in much the same way as is heaven: ethical living, mindfulness, and the wisdom gained by them. What this view does avoid is the struggle to right wrongs since what we might often call wrongs are a necessary and functional part of living that we have to learn to navigate to get where we want to go. 

Not the Same, But Not Completely Different

We're pretty much born into one of these worldviews. It's pretty hard for someone born in the U.S., like me, to think about things the way a Buddhist or a Taoist would. Most of us grew up balancing the voices between the bickering angel on our right shoulder and the nasty little devil on our left. The idea that those two rascals don't exist, that my ideas of good and evil are pretty much irrelevant, that there is no heaven or hell, well, that's a reach. But it also makes sense in a way because we know from experience that suffering can hone us to sharpness and difficulty can breed a kind of wisdom that ease never does. That they should need each other to make us the best we can be may not be so crazy after all. 

As for me, I like the idea of working to make this world a better place but at the same time the thought of floating off into an egoless Nirvana where good and evil don't matter anymore sounds pretty appealing, too. Maybe like you, I don't exactly know what will happen when I shrug off my physical body, but until then, Donkey has some good advice:

Images: ergo blog, jade dragon school

No Clocks in Eden

 

Sommarøy, a small Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway, decided in 2019 to get rid of all of its clocks. Anyone traveling there will find a land whose summer sun shines all day long and whose 300+ inhabitants are free to swim Caribbean blue waters or laze on sand beaches in the middle of the night because, well, nobody there cares what time it is. 

Just Imagine

Look around. Right now. How many devices do you use to tell you the time? I have two in the room I'm in and another in the room next door. I look at them constantly, even when the time doesn't matter. Like now. It's a kind of reflex, a way of grounding myself. If I know the time, I've got a handle on the world. 

But that's not true.

Of all of the constructs of man, time is one of the most insidious. We're either early or behind. We're constantly being measured by it. We worry about how much time something takes, or whether we have time to do this or that. We hurry through nearly everything to make sure we can fit it all in. If we didn't care about time, we would never have to be busy in the same way. We wouldn't constantly be rushing past people or things of ordinary beauty. We might finally be able to stop and SEE.

Time and the Spirit

It's not just the clock that's the problem. The clock is just a natural extension of the idea of time in the macro. It's looking at life in terms of what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It's the concepts of past and future. That's time, too. 

We often talk about the importance of living in the NOW, being present for life's events as they occur as if that's all we have because, well, it IS all we have. The concept of time, the idea that we can in some way hold on to or influence what has already happened or what has not yet happened hogties our life. It is the origin of both regret and fear. Without time, we wouldn't give yesterday or tomorrow a second thought and they don't deserve it.

Time and Eternity

God, who made us, lives beyond time. Everything in His consciousness is happening right now, to everyone everywhere. Every person who lived, every person who will ever live, you and me, are equally present to Him every second. Time, the hours of it and the passage of it, are an entirely human concept and the more we tie ourselves to the idea that time is real (it isn't), the farther we put ourselves away from God. 

Do you really think God put clocks in Eden? Of course He didn't. Nobody needed them. Those walks He took with Adam in the cool of the day had no limit, no recorded beginning or end. Their union was without any kind of limit, time or otherwise. 

Hmmm...  I stopped setting my alarm clock about 40 years ago, but darn. Looks like I didn't go far enough. Those folks on Sommarøy might be on to something. 

Image: Islands