Ash Wednesdays are like birthdays of a certain sort. I can visualize my life as a hazy string of foreheads with dusty crosses. This is part of what I love about being Catholic; these seasons, these built-in opportunities to pause, are catalysts for reflection and self-improvement that, year after year, hold a mirror up to the person I’ve become. Although, my Ash Wednesday began a bit earlier this year. On Sunday, I participated in a traditional Dakota sweat lodge ceremony with the Red Wind community near Mt. Hood. We’d been talking about going to the sweat lodge ceremony for months, but it worked out nicely that we finally got there just before the start of Lent.
“Return to the Lord with your whole heart.” Those are the words we hear from the prophet every year on this day. Return. It’s my favorite mantra during the Lenten season, but sometimes it’s hard to make a return—and maybe even hard to determine to what I am returning because things look different. T.S. Eliot wrote, in “Little Gidding”, “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” We’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to this; but we are never the same, so Lent meets us where we are, at the place we have arrived after our 365-day journey, and we’re invited to do Lent once again— but always differently. “Once again, yet deeper,” as I read once somewhere. This means going back to the essence of who we are, even if the Truths are clothed in new and varying contexts. Ashes, we’re told today. We were dust and we will make our return to dust, no doubt about it. That’s at least one thing that remains the same always.
The guy who was pouring our sweat lodge (i.e., leading us in this ritual so foreign to me) is called Nupa. Some of the first words he said to us as we sat, somewhat terrified, awaiting the entrance of a pile of sizzling rocks, were these: “It’s a good day to die!” Just like that. Exclamatory. And I begged to differ. But he meant that this day is a fine day for putting aside the parts of ourselves that we’ve outgrown, that are no longer helpful or healthy, that hold us back from the inner peace and the sense of harmony that we desire with our Creator, our brothers and sisters, our ancestors ,and our own deepest longings. We crawled like babies into the sweat lodge, a make-shift tent constructed from sixteen willow branches and some thick blankets and only tall enough to ensure that our heads didn’t scrape the inside of the roof as we sat, cross-legged, on the earth. We were returning, humbling ourselves, recognizing where we came from and where we’d ultimately end up—in the belly of the Creator, the womb of Mother Earth. Dirt. Ashes.
We needed to crawl on our hands and our knees into this dark lodge because sometimes it’s too hard to hear your own thoughts on the “outside,” especially while maintaining some lofty ideas about who we are, a project that can suck the life out of us if we’re not careful. We crawl to Mass every Sunday for the same reason. And this is also why we need to be reminded every year that God is constantly whispering, “Come back to me”—because we can’t maintain serenity in the storm without periodically returning to a center, preferably a substantial one. I love to talk about Yeats’ famous poem, “The Second Coming” because it is so often true that in life, “things fall apart” and the “centre cannot hold.” But that all depends on what you consider your center. I suppose God is the exception to that, and if we come back to Square One with God every so often, it helps stabilize us even as the world twirls like the spiral accessory on our teapot’s spout.
We, as physical beings, need something tangible to remind us to pause and take a breath, just one breath. We need [something akin to] a tent full of sweaty bodies and hot rocks and stifling steam and terrifying darkness to pull us out of our quotidian rhythm. We need a cross on our foreheads in the midst of a normal busy week. We need purple banners at our otherwise second-nature Sunday Mass. We need all of these things, and Crucifixes and Labyrinths and the Sign of the Cross, because our physicality is so inseparably connected to who we are as spiritual beings, and God knows that. This is why Jesus became “The Way” for us. As a Jesuit priest at St. Ignatius reminded me recently, Christ is the “word God speaks to us, the hand God outstretches to us” in a language we can comprehend, when we have wandered a bit farther away from that center and need a way back. Jesus, the ultimate example of God-made-physical (AKA a Sacrament!) is a bridge for us. So we get it. Because otherwise we might never return.
As I sat in this tiny tent, sweat cascading down my face like the water at Multnomah Falls, I had two simultaneous thoughts of equal clarity, the first being “I’m going to die,” and the second being a tranquil certainty that the Divine sat with me in those moments of suffering and terror. I tend to see the world as a blend of the earthly and the Divine, separated by the thinnest of veils. Kind of like the smoothies Lindsay makes—all mixed together, but you can still kind of distinguish the flavors if you try. Mr. Renner, my revered English teacher from high school, once spoke of death as a thin, vaporous curtain that we pass through. We’re always that close to Backstage. We’re always that close to God, but it’s sometimes easy to overlook our daily divinity.
There are days when I feel like I’m seeing the world in Technicolor, feeling every sensation with an almost painful acuteness, but there are also days when the sky is gray and that’s it. When I’m just plain tired or hungry or annoyed, and there’s seemingly nothing holy about it. Fasting today is uncomfortable for me. Being in the dark, claustrophobic tent and struggling so hard to take on breath of that hot air was nearly unbearable. I could just stop there, but I think that these are the out-of-the-ordinary spaces I need to create sometimes to give God a little room to work.
I need to empty myself, be it through deprivation of lunch today or an outpouring of sweat and tears and fears in the lodge ceremony. When I isolate these physical parts of me, my need to focus on something else, something deeper, something beyond the earthly, becomes pretty evident. We, as spirits embodied, are Sacraments. God touching earth. The Divine in a form that we can understand. We’re not Jesus, and we’re not Holy Communion, but we are and have the potential to be God incarnate to others, even in our imperfect states. The extent to which we are able to notice the Spirit flowing through us depends on a lot of things: our stopping to listen to and look for God, our willingness to take a step back from the busyness and noise of our lives and simplify a bit, our receptivity to God’s call, which—as Elijah learned—doesn’t always come in a thunderous, look-at-me, sort of way but often in the form of a still, small voice, so subtle that we may miss it if we’re always waiting for something major (1 Kings 19).
Maybe this is why we start with Ash Wednesday and why it catches me every year, throws me off balance a little bit—just enough that I take note. We need to begin once again, as children crawling in the dirt (and yet never all alone) into the dark places where, if we want to and even sometimes if we don’t, we can meet God. We need to empty ourselves by fasting on days like today and by purging our lives of clutter, material or otherwise, so that we can breathe. We need to create a space, even if that just means I remove dessert from my life for 40 days because that will remind me of the season. And when we strip off these layers, we find ourselves pretty spiritually naked before God. We open the door and invite in all sorts of craziness. We ask to be probed and prodded, and that vulnerability takes courage and trust. We pour out everything we have (you should have felt the heap of emotions that our sweat lodge group dispelled!) and we sit, empty vessels waiting to be filled not only by the food and drink and stimulation of this world but by the peace and forgiveness and compassion of the next. This isn’t necessarily comfortable—I truly thought my life was coming to an end in that lodge—but sometimes it isn’t supposed to be. If it were easy to walk the path of Enlightenment or follow that sacred bridge, we wouldn’t need to refocus like this.
Lent, like the sweat lodge ceremony, seems to be about sitting in the hard places for a bit and just seeing what happens. Filling up on that unending supply of love and mercy and letting that be our nourishment and our motivation. And finally, crawling out of there, nearly breathless, and carrying that feeling around with us. Not everyone has this opportunity, I’ve realized. The sometimes glamorized process of simplifying our lives, of sitting in discomfort and difficulty, isn’t something about which many people (most people) in our world have any choice. My sole meal today will be a simple plate of rice and beans which is, for others, a daily reality. And if I need to do this every once in awhile to feel myself move closer to God, then how close must the poor, the hungry, and the oppressed already be to our Creator! [This, of course, is the fundamental tenet of Liberation Theology—the concept that these are the folks who are closest to the heart of God, and that God’s favor rests on them in a special way. Thus we, desiring to be like the God, will live our lives with a Preferential Option for the Poor as well.]
During the sweat lodge ceremony, I experienced some pretty intense moments of clarity when I was able to put aside my fear. I felt held, I felt challenged, I felt a loving—always loving— gaze resting on me. I emerged soaking wet, absolutely exhausted, and pretty hungry but with focus and an authentic understanding of why people do this. The space was an effective mechanism for prayer, in spite of but also because of the physical obstacles that it entailed. All along, Nupa encouraged us from the darkness—in a voice barely audible amidst the chanting and drumming—to remember why we had come. To dig in, and to re-commit. To place our trust in the hands of something bigger than ourselves because without a grander focus, we couldn’t continue to endure such a physically unpleasant experience. Do this, he told us, and breathe, take one breath.
Lent is all about remembering who and whose we are. All about re-committing our lives to God and to the service of God’s children. We’re like salmon (OK, this is the Northwest imagery making its appearance) who wander faraway and then endure a grueling, and ultimately deadly, journey upstream to the place they started because they know exactly where they want to end up. That’s the goal: explore, explore, explore, return, return, return. Different. Ashes. We recognize that we don’t have forever on this earth, that things aren’t easy and we aren’t perfect, that there’s a lot of work to do. So we dig in, and the digging starts here, on a Wednesday (the worst of days, don’t you think?), as we trod through our daily mud, amidst all this noise, perhaps on an empty stomach. And we’re supposed to find God here! We’re supposed to make our way back, even if the journey is unpleasant and painful. Even if it rains 15 days in a row. Even in the dark.
Today is a good day to die. A good day to remember. To return, with our whole hearts—or at least take one step in that direction. So we begin Lent once again, yet deeper, aware of the labor that lies ahead and also the peace that we might find if we create the space for it. We start our journey upstream. We take one hot, hungry breath. We dig in.
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