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Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.

             These solemn words, taken from the Book of Genesis (3:19), are used in the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. 
            Samuel Johnson once observed that nothing so concentrates the mind as the prospect of being hanged in the morning.  Life looks very different in the face of death, whether or not death is imminent. 
            Some people, especially young people, live as though they were immortal, which may be the reason why they take risks which seem to us older folk as unwise.  The words said at the grave begin, “In the midst of life we are in death.”  This realistic attitude, which sees death as a part of life, enables us to accept and appreciate life as it is—a gift from God.  
            During the season of Lent we accompany our Lord Jesus Christ on his journey to his passion and death, even death upon a cross.  In the words of the hymn, he is “our captain in the well-fought fight,” a fight in which we are all combatants. 
            Nowadays many of the traditional Lenten practices have gone by the board.  In the Roman Catholic Church the Lenten fast is no longer observed, and even the practice of giving up something for Lent is no longer taken as seriously as it once was.  People joke about giving up their New Year’s resolutions. 
            Here at the Good Shepherd we mark this holy season not by giving something up but by adding something on: a noon eucharist on Wednesdays.  This leaves plenty of scope for each of you to structure this seed-time of the church in the way which will bring you the most spiritual benefit. 
            Today’s collect speaks of “our flesh being subdued to the spirit.”  Today we do not practice the mortification of the body to which Paul refers when he writes, “I pommel my body and subdue it, lest preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (First Corinthians 9:27).  However, we all recognize what he is talking about when he says, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Romans 7:18). 
            Lent is the time when, through spiritual exercises of our own choosing, we strive to narrow the gap between what we will and what we do.  It gives us an opportunity to shift gears, to break the changeless routine which can be so deadly for the spiritual life. 
            I conclude with some lines by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
                                    Margaret, are you grieving
                                    Over Goldengrove unleaving?
                                                ***********
                                    It is the blight man was born for;
                                    It is Margaret you mourn for.

February 10, 2008

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