Yesterday, Fat Tuesday, was so very different from every other Mardi Gras I have experienced since we moved to Mobile. Normally… whatever normal is… I would have been sitting on my front porch people-watching… Mardi Gras is a great day for people-watching… rich, poor, big, little, male, female, black, white…. all walks of life there in microcosm in gaudy procession on the streets of Mobile, amid the spangles of frivolity… praise of eternal fatness… a last gasp of satiety before the austerity of the days of Lent… But yesterday was so very different, somber, pandemonium the wily culprit. In the gathering dark of late afternoon my mind drifted into consideration of the state of things… Our complicated world… the tyranny in our democracy among other things…. of the willful ignorance in our culture… the incongruity of it all… I thought that there are basically two types of people: Those who pay attention and those who do not… that perhaps the presence of evil in the world is merely contingent to our choice for ignoring the truth; and that our salvation, on the other hand, giving ourselves over to it. Truth is not relative. Truth is truth.
Lent is the season in the church in which we are called, in short, to pay attention. The watch word is repentance… “metanoia” in the Greek, which means literally to “turn towards reasonableness”…. We interpret that word in our modern western culture as having to do with owning up to our sins, and certainly that is a part of it… but really the word means to wake up… to pay attention… to become reasonable; that word also implies maturity. The reason we gather as a church is to nurture the maturing process in the faith. So, we are to pay attention as “adult Christians”… to pay attention to what we carry around in our hearts and minds… and to pay attention to what is going on in the world around us. There are ways to do that… meditation; fasting; deprivation of the usual things in which we indulge; our Lenten Wednesdays I recommend as another good way… but the point of it all is to willfully become aware; to wake up to reality as best we can. The poet T.S. Eliot laments that humankind “can’t bear much reality”… Perhaps that is the long and the short of our vocation: to be real. Easier said than done, of course… because being real takes honesty, and empathy …and courage.
Lent, or the forty days before Easter, in the early church, was a time of preparation for Baptism… a time of study and reflection in preparation for the initiation into the vocation of being real…. Lent is characterized by its seriousness… getting serious about our faith, because the practice of being followers of Jesus is serious business. It matters. More than we know, I think. We say in the church that we are resurrection people; that we are a people who claim joy as our modus operandi. And I want to say that joy is a practice, a choice. Indeed that joy, or the pantomime of it, would have normally been on parade in the streets of Mobile yesterday… but that joy is incomplete, hollow, unless we acknowledge with due compassion, own up to the ruin around us… own up to the fact… the reality… that we are mortal… that life is short… that the world, including our own bodies, crumbles around us seeking some elemental equilibrium… despite the persistent illusion that things last forever. Among the ambiguities of the life of faith; the premise of Ash Wednesday is unambiguous: we die… and life is short… and there is so little time to be real.
So what shall we say about our lives of faith? Walker Percy wrote a novel entitled Love in the Ruins. For me, that is an apt description of what the life of faith is all about. Love in the ruins. We, brothers and sisters, are the people who pay attention to the artful ambiguity of life. For some mysterious reason God is drawn to ambiguity, contrast, irony even; that for God, the light only has meaning in the face of the dark; that joy is not joy without the suffering and trials of life; that life is not life without the experience of death…. We Christians are the people who see beauty, or at least claim it until we can see it, in a world passing away; but a world that is transformed and made ever new by the presence of Love. “Love in the ruins.”
I bid you therefore to keep a holy Lent… that is, pay attention… wake up to the world within you, and to the world without. Wake up to the ruinous injustice that erodes the foundations of our humanity. Imagine in these forty days what Love might do in the midst of the world’s ruin… Imagine what Love can do in the midst of the ash and dust of our mortality. Imagine what germinates in the fecundity of the world’s decay.
I would like to think that we are a people, we Christians… that we are a people who in our honesty, in our lives of sacrifice for the good of the whole, in our paying attention, in our seriousness, in the nobility of our vocation…. I’d like to think that the Love we bear as a people, is that which makes this life redeemable; the mystery that makes this life worth living, makes it purposeful, meaningful… not just for us, but for the world around us. I want to believe that Love is stronger than death, that Love is stronger than fear; stronger than despair…. It is our work to make that true…. We are the ones who choose courage over comfort and indifference…. So keep awake for the choice that will come surely. That is our legacy, good people…. To choose Love…the virulent ruin notwithstanding… Choose Love… even amid the ashes.
