Dwelling in the Desert (Ash Wednesday)

As we mark Ash Wednesday and begin the season of Lent, Justin Fung talks about the difficulty of the deserts we find ourselves in — the places of “This is not what I thought life would look like” — and the opportunities that lie there too. [2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10] Resources Abraham Heschel, “Dust and Image”, from I Asked for Wonder: Man … is a duality of mysterious grandeur and pompous aridity, a vision of God and a mountain of dust. It is because of his being dust that his iniquities may be forgiven, and it is because of his being an image that his righteousness is expected. Fr. Ron Rolheiser, “Entering Lent”: “[In fasting] Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up to the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us. That’s the Christian ideal of Lent, to face one’s chaos. … The need for Lent is experienced everywhere: Without sublimation we can never attain what is sublime. To truly enter a feast there must first be a fast. To come properly to Easter there must first be a time of desert, ashes, heaviness, and tears.” Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Walter Brueggemann, and Eugene Peterson, The Life with God Bible: “Our wildernesses and deserts are not our endings. It is the Spirit of God who leads us about in them. They are our opportunities.” Jan Richardson, “Blessing the Dust”: All those days you felt like dust, like dirt, as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial— Did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust? This is the day we freely say we are scorched. This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning. This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient ashes, that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth. So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made, and the stars that blaze in our bones, and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear