The Buried Life: an Ash Wednesday meditation

In our garden, once, stood a weeping-willow. (I'm sorry I don't have an image of it.) In spring and summer, it was the most beautiful of trees, its long, delicate fronds sweeping down to the grass in a graceful canopy. Our children used to wave its branches at the Palm Sunday procession.  Each morning we would waken to bird-song from its crown. One day, however, the neighbours asked for more light (a very theological kind of request). So our tree was cut right back to the trunk. It stood there gaunt and skeletal against the sky, a parody of its former self. The birds found somewhere else to sing. Our garden fell silent.

But, my neighbours keep on assuring me, the tree had its own hidden life. In a month or so, when it is spring, they said, we shall see it. The secret sap, rising now in full flow, would bear its fruit, they said. The birds would yet again sing on its topmost branches. Like Thomas Hardy at Christmas, I spent the early part of that year “hoping it might be so”. And they were right. By midsummer, the tree had miraculously grown back, if not quite to what it had been before, then at least greened over once more. Back came the birds. And the arguments over our neighbours’ right to light began all over again.

The secret life is what the Ash Wednesday gospel** is about.  It is not trumpets and the acclaim of others that herald our almsgiving, our prayer, our fasting, says Jesus: if those rewards go on mattering to you any more (and how hard it is to outgrow them!), then they are yours for the asking.  No: only one thing matters, what God sees in secret: those inward stirrings of our heart towards God, the sap rising deep within our souls. When we feel that impulse within, we know that nothing matters but that we were made for God, restless till we find our rest in him. We know our truth for which we would live and die. We know we are alive.

It's amazing to me how uncurious people can be about their inner lives, how uncurious I can be.  “People travel to wonder at the mountains, the sea, the stars, and pass by themselves without wonderment” said Augustine.  I sense that it is when I am least attentive to my own inwardness that I become less than I should be, less than human.  Perhaps it is at precisely those times that poison seeps into the organism, mingling with the sap, diluting its healing, life-giving qualities, stunting my growth.  I am thinking of how, insidiously, even over a short lifetime, habits, addic­tions, destructive attitudes infiltrate and take root, become part of us, and everything feeds them, good as well as evil, beauty, music, books, even friendship, even religion itself.  We can become obsessed with the things Jesus warns us about: what he calls our rewards. We need never know what is happening to us until it is too late. That is the really frightening thing.

Lent is, therefore, an annual gift to those who take the secret life seriously - which means all of us, for what is religion if it is not attending to our own inwardness?  Lent is a time for reckoning with our own discontent - that blissful unease of spirit that throws us into God because there is nowhere else for us to go.  It is a time to encounter God in a new way, hear him stand at the door and knock, face up to what is demanded of us if we would attain to the dignity of being human beings. 

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife, 
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life,
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course.

Matthew Arnold is right. We need to check our course constantly, I understand that. But Lent offers me the chance of an annual review of our life’s journey, and how true our bearings are to that original course God set us on in baptism. To fast from distraction, from all the voices that compete for our attention, to become, as Buddhists say, “single pointed”, intentional about why we human beings are here on this good earth is deeply important from time to time. It’s what Jesus means by having “purity of heart”.

It’s a simple enough ceremony, to receive the ashes on our foreheads as a sign of turning back to God in memory of our baptism and in anticipation of Easter. But how profoundly this movement from dust to fire sums up the meaning of our mortal existence in the light of the paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection!

Maybe this Lent could be a time when I say yes to God with a new awareness of divine love stirring within. This would be to allow the sap to rise and our buried life’s flow to begin again and reach the surface. It would be to find that we are doing Love’s work in the world. For at its heart, Lent is always a work of love.

**Matthew 6.1-18