Mar 06., 2019   /   General, Soul Food, Updates and Activities

Running on Empty: A Reflection on Ash Wednesday

Near the end of my more than three years of intensive psychotherapy, I had a very vivid dream. In that dream, I was in a strange house completely dark and foreboding. I was slowly moving from one room to another, lighting a candle in each room, haunted and terrified by an intense, suffocating loneliness. In therapy, the meaning of the dream gradually unfolded: I was afraid that no matter how much light I can muster, the house of my childhood will forever be empty. Henceforth, I must learn to live with the void.

We fill up that void by busyness and noise, by a surfeit of passing pleasures, by  a horror vacuii that cuts deep into our very being, such that we cannot name who we are apart from what we do or what we have. Such is our need, such is our fear.

It was a painful lesson to learn. I had grown up precisely doing the opposite: filling the void with achievement, in the tragic childish belief that maybe if I do good, I will be loved. And yet in this I am not alone. We all have experienced loss. Heartbreak, suffering, pain, disappointment—even the natural wear and tear of our bodies as we age—all the promise of life inexorably slipping through our trembling fingers, the daily little dyings that foreshadow our last breath. And still we run away: filling that emptiness through various means: achievement, efficiency, popularity, an unending accumulation of lovers, friends, titles, money, fame, the latest gadgets or even facebook likes. We fill up that void by busyness and noise, by a surfeit of passing pleasures, by a horror vacuii that cuts deep into our very being, such that we cannot name who we are apart from what we do or what we have. Such is our need, such is our fear.

Thus, in an acutely existential way, we are running on empty, most of our lives. We are just blind to it. Then Lent arrives, with its no nonsense, in-your-face beginning: Ash Wednesday. Nothing can so completely disarm us of our denial than the ashes on our foreheads, and the reminder that we are, and will sooner or later become, dust. And yet, in this rather brusque beginning, we are given unguent for our wounds, and a fallow time of forty days of deep, deep grace, in order to prepare us for the shining truth of Easter.

Lent tells us that the only way out is through: through that emptiness, through that pain, through that deep gnawing ache that no person or object or experience can completely assuage.

 

image from Chern Blom’s Blog

What is this balm of Lent that heals our emptiness? Lent begins with this resounding call from the prophet Joel: “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God.” Lent tells us that the only way out is through: through that emptiness, through that pain, through that deep gnawing ache that no person or object or experience can completely assuage. We must face the truth that we are radically incomplete this side of heaven, and we must therefore rend our hearts and mourn our losses. And yet that is not the whole truth, nor the more important one, in fact. Joel makes it very clear: we are to return to the Lord with all our hearts. Therein lies our balm, therein lies the core of our truth: only God can fill us, only God can bring love and light and joy into the most secret recesses of our hearts. Only God can give us the fullness of life that is our birthright. The journey of Lent marks this return: we sin and run away, God searches for us and brings us home.

In this homecoming to God, which finds its summit in the Easter Triduum, we are shown the way. Jesus points out that we are to give alms, to pray and to fast. He tells us that we are to do all these “in secret,” because the Father “sees in secret.” What does this mean? And how can these three help to heal our emptiness?

When we open our hearts to God in prayer, we are brought to the truth of our own poverty, of our radical need for God.

 

In a counterintuitive move that could only come from God, almsgiving, praying and fasting heal our emptiness precisely by bringing us face-to-face with the depth of our insufficiency. We open our hands to help another in need, thereby reminding ourselves that we are never too poor to give, and that whatever we give away will never diminish us, because our worth is not found in what we own. When we open our hearts to God in prayer, we are brought to the truth of our own poverty, of our radical need for God. In prayer we receive that deeply felt knowing that, in the memorable words of the Psalmist, “the Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing that I shall want (Ps 23).” When we fast from what we want, when we surrender our needs and desires, be they physical or otherwise, we learn the value of self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is nothing but saying “no” to something desirable and perhaps even good, for the sake of a greater “yes” which is grounded in God. In short, to fast is to stop running after that which satiates us, in order to listen to our deeper longing for God.

Finally, Jesus tells us to give alms, to pray and to fast “in secret.” Clearly, there is a lesson in humility here. But perhaps what the Lord desires to deepen in us is also single-heartedness, that purity of intentions that the presence of an audience for all our good work can becloud. When we embrace these practices of self-emptying deprived of other people’s acclamations, we experience the depth of God’s incomparable, providential love for us. Then we are truly, incredibly filled, hearts ready and primed for the glories of Easter.

Article by Sr. Cecille Tuble, rc