Our own Honorary Canon Jim Bethell recently told me a story about visiting a crematorium and peering through the peephole that allowed him to see a human body in the process of becoming ash. His main takeaway was surprise. The body was luminous, he said. The process seemed to generate more of a glow than a conflagration: Jim described it as something akin to a sunset. This because the body serves as its own fuel, as the crematory operator explained to Jim. Of course that process of thermal oxidation is present during life as well as death. Our digestive process is an exothermic slow burn, and our cells are consumed at the rate of some 300 billion per day. Later or sooner: we will all return to the ash whence we came. But in the meantime, we are made to burn.
What neither science nor cremation technology could explain to Jim, however, was the shock of recognition he felt when he saw the name attached to the luminous corpse. It was Edith Bethell, spelled in the same way as his own surname. Whose bodily disposition was he witnessing, anyway? As Jim was telling me this story, I felt a certain shock of recognition as well. That’s what Lent is, no? Our in invitation us to peer into the peephole of our own mortality. To look bravely at those biological and spiritual processes of burning that will inevitably return us to the same inert minerals—the dust and ash—that God breathed life into at the beginning of creation. So my Ash Wednesday question for you is, how’s your burn going?
Fire. It demands our attention and threatens our safety. Ask Moses, whose encounter with the burning bush sent him on a perilous journey to free his people. Or ask the disciples trembling behind closed doors when tongues of fire came upon them and filled them with words of fearsome power. Fire speaks, fire leads, fire purifies.
Fire is also dangerous. I’m a native of desert climes, so I grew up under the constant threat of fire. But whether we started out our mortal lives in arid Los Angeles or rainy Portland, we’re all suffering the effects of a warming planet. In that sense, we are not so different from the people to whom the prophet Joel addressed his lament. They were facing ecological catastrophe—in the form of a plague of locusts—and the prophet called them to rededicate themselves to God. Not for the hatred of self or of sin, but for the love of God whom they knew to be gracious and merciful. Because our safety in insecure times is always God.
Ashes, while they aren’t mentioned specifically in either of our lessons today, go hand in hand with torn clothing as Biblical signs of mourning. Perhaps because both are physical representations the inevitability of decay. But God—who is always in the business of transforming death into life—reframes the task of grieving. Although we will all die, we don’t need to pre-emptively assume the trappings of death. God calls for our hearts to be rent, not our clothing.
In a similar reversal of expectations, Biblical fire usually serves as a sign of vitality, not extinguishment. Yes, some ash will be created in the process of burning—and indeed the entire cosmic process will result in ash—but in the meantime, God invites us to live as people lit up as with passionate fire. With the ardor of love, as the poets might describe it.
English poet and priest George Herbert, whom the Episcopal Church commemorated just last Wednesday, wrote—
Immortal Heat, O let Thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it; let those fires
Which shall consume the world first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires.
As may consume our lusts, and make Thee way:
Then shall our hearts pant Thee, then shall our brain
All her invention on Thine altar lay,
And there in hymns send back Thy fire again.
There is an inevitability to the immortal heat, that greater flame of God that George Herbert wrote of. In the fullness of time, it will consume our lesser desires, just as life consumes our mortal bodies. Our sun, in its natural stellar evolution, will finally consume this fragile earth, our island home. And all of this is not punishment for our sins; it is simply the way the universe was designed by a loving God. The Lord who is full of
compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness, will not be overcome by natural processes nor by ecological crisis nor by human sin. But instead, will invite us—time and again—to return to God as our first love.
We might think of our traditional Lenten disciplines—prayer, fasting and almsgiving—as a kind of spiritual kindling. For a season, they are a practice of burning away the lesser loves of self-centeredness and overconsumption so that the greater love of God—which is inherently relational and self-giving—can become more clear in our sight. George Herbert put it this way—
Our eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust,
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all Thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:
All knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise Him Who did make and mend our eyes.
Lent offers us a but a peephole into the greater burn. Into the searing certainty that that we must ultimately give everything back to the God who gave us carbon-based life in the first place. So why not give some of the classical disciplines of Lent a try? You can’t get this wrong. If, for example, you take advantage of the season to pray more, there are two possibilities. You may find that it’s an experience of intimacy which is a return to the Lord, or you may find it is an experience of frustration in which you learn to trust God’s grace over your own efforts. If you fast, which might be consuming less food or less media or less busy-ness, you might encounter a deeper hunger for God. If you give alms, you might find yourself overcome with God’s own generosity. You might even discover, as the apostles and mystics have, that there is no loss in losing everything for the sake of the Gospel.
May the mark of ash—the remnant of fire—invite us into the wisdom of the fourth century desert monastics, who taught what spiritual disciplines are for. Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph, the story goes, and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of flame. He said: Why not become fire?
