Do you remember the instant in which you first knew that you would die? I was about nine or ten years old, and sitting in the bathtub. I don’t know what triggered the moment of morbid reflection—I was perfectly healthy—but I clearly remember the sight of my skinny little leg bones under the water and the crinkled, water-logged skin on my hands, and the rising and falling of breath in my chest, and the horrible, unthinkable thought that exploded without warning into my mind: “There will come a time when I will be no more. And there is nothing that I can do to prevent that day.” Suddenly, a tiny bit of the carefree nonchalance of childhood vanished down the bathtub drain for me. Seventeenth-century Roman Catholic priest Jacques Bossuet masterfully expresses the horrified wonder that we all feel at the fragility of our existence: “How insignificant we are …. Only the length of time of my life makes me different than that which never was … I come into life with the law that I must leave it, I come to act out my role, I come to show myself to others; afterwards, I must disappear.”[1] Indeed, we are but dust, and to dust we shall each return.
On Ash Wednesday, we repent of our sins at the same time that we remember that we are but dust. Death and sin: the two chains that bind us human beings, the two chains from which we are set free only in Christ’s resurrection. Ash Wednesday invites us to begin the Lenten season of repentance by looking our mortality and our imperfection squarely in the face.“Why dwell on sin and death?” you might ask. “It is painful and depressing. What good does it do me to sit around for 40 days with a broken heart?”
Poet Mary Oliver hints at an answer in her poem, “Lead.” She begins, “Here is a story/ to break your heart./ Are you willing?” She tells the story of a group of wintering loons that fly into her neighborhood only to die, gracefully, one by one, from some mysterious environmental poison. Appreciating life even in their tragic death, they cry out, “in the long, sweet savoring of … life/ which, if you have heard it, you know is a sacred thing.” After singing, the loon, “speckled/ and iridescent and with a plan/ to fly home/ to some hidden lake,/ was dead on the shore.” Oliver then concludes in her wise way, “I tell you this/ to break your heart,/ by which I mean only/ that it break open and never close again/ to the rest of the world.” Our hearts must break not so that we may be crushed, but so that we may be filled with the Love that is around us.
Often, it is our very horror of death that prevents us from living the full and loving lives that God intends for us to live in this world. While loons and other animals can go about joyfully living and dying, unaware of their inevitable death and the tragedy of it, we human beings become frozen with the knowledge of our own finitude. The death that we fear and the death that we mete out to others in violence hold sway over everything that we do.[2] Our fear of death makes us want to control others, through power or violence; it drives us to attempt to keep death away by accumulating possessions or control; it eats away at our hope for the future; it encourages us to think that the body and the material world are evil, or meaningless. I even wonder if it is our discomfort with death that makes us reluctant to talk about sin, since the two are so subconsciously intertwined. Perhaps we think that if we don’t talk about sin, then we won’t have to talk about death, either. If we don’t think about our own moral weakness, then we don’t have to think about the weakness of our bodies. But whether we talk about them or not, our terrified awareness of sin and death keep us in bondage to sin and death, and prevents us from truly turning our hearts to the Love of God that is all around us.
The answer to our human predicament, of course, is that Christ came to break our hearts open, once and for all. Christ came to die for love, to make us dwell in love. Descended into Hell, Christ, in an ancient Greek Holy Saturday homily, calls out to Adam and Eve, saying, “I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together, we form only one person and cannot be separated.”[3]
Since Creation is permeated with the love of God, and we are knit together with Christ, it is our Anglican belief that the will can be transformed through patient Christian practice and piety: through prayer, the reading of Scripture, the Eucharist, through being Christ’s hands and feet in the world. But for practice and piety not to remain a dangerously ineffectual outward show, we must also allow the reality of sin and death to break our hearts open. If, in facing the inevitability of our death, our hearts have been broken open, God can seep into them through love, acting upon our minds through faith, and quietly bending our wills through grace, until we are filled with the hope that allows us, like Jesus, to act in love ourselves. By letting our hearts be broken, we open ourselves to God, to life, and to the rest of creation. This Lent, are you willing to listen to “a story to break your heart?” Are we willing to look mortality squarely in the face, to confess the depth of our sin and our need of repentance, and to watch faithfully as God’s own heart is broken in the passion of God’s Son?
“Here is a story to break your heart. Are you willing?”
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