February 17 Ash Wednesday
When our e-newsletter, The Open Doors, arrives in my inbox, the first thing I look for is the door that our Communications Director, Mark Alderfer, has chosen for the week. They range from the grand entrances of Gothic cathedrals to meager openings in mud walls to garden gates covered in ivy.
Doorways are evocative. They are “liminal” places, quite literally, for “limen” means “threshold”. And liminal places are boarders. Places between some here and some there.
Roman grooms carried their new brides across thresholds. And the doorposts of Jewish homes bear Mezuzahs, tiny scrolls inscribed with the Shema from the book of Deuteronomy. Practices as different as these point to the strange power of doorways and liminal places.
Lent is a liminal time, a doorway to Easter, perhaps. But as an in between place, it has a power all its own. And we begin this season with a ritual that still startles me after all these years. We begin this season with a clear reminder of a limit, a word with the same source as liminal, as you might have guessed. With a smudge of ash on the forehead we are reminded of the mortal limit of our lives: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” A reminder of the doorway between life and death.
You won’t be told to remember that you are dust in an advertisement. Not even an ad for a funeral home or a life insurance company. No, we seem to live in a time forgetful of the power of liminal places because we want nothing more than to be free of all limits.
We seem to think that what we need, no matter the problem, is always more. More income, more productivity and more GDP. Longer lives and more comprehensive insurance policies. Faster search engines and bigger hard drives. And no generation wants to hear the bad news that we’re not as well off as our parents. And isn’t it the refusal to accept limits, isn’t it the belief that we can always be more and have more and do always more that has driven us forward and made us so healthy, so wealthy and so wise?
But if we’re honest, at times it feels like we’re all turning in to the guy in the old joke who complains to his waiter that the food is terrible, and that the portions are too small. Isn’t it possible that we’re being conditioned to want more and more of a life that is becoming less and less worth living? In wanting more and more we seem to become only less and less satisfied.
Isaiah might be helpful to us, because Isaiah seems to be telling Israel that it had its yokes and its freedoms confused. Believing there were no limits on their actions was an enslavement of sorts: “Look,” the prophet says. “You serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers.” It was an obsession with self interest that created their bondage. Sound liken any other culture you know? Maybe extracting all we can from other people, oppressing those who work for us, doing and tolerating injustice, maybe these are the yokes we need to throw off. Maybe believing that we can do as we please is our prison too.
Conversely, Isaiah insists that to find the blessed life God intends, Israel must turn its attention to people closer to the edge, people who know necessity and limitation all too well. “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then,” Isaiah says, “then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong.”
The yoke Isaiah says we need to throw off is believing we can do anything we want. Throw off the yoke of self interest. And share. Share your food with the hungry. Share your shelter with the homeless. Share your profits with your workers. “Let go,” says the prophet, “And live.”
And here’s the radical assumption beneath it all: There is enough. Right here among us there is enough. And maybe light in our lives breaks forth like the dawn, not because we’ve become charitable, but when we simply realize that there is enough. It’s Isaiah’s anti stimulus plan for Lent. If we can throw off the oppressive yoke of caring only for ourselves, of always needing more, of pretending that there should be no limits to what we can own or do or be, then we will begin to find the blessing God intends for our lives.
Which means Lent may really be a time to find something that’s been here all along. Lent may be a time to remember that the limits of our small lives are large enough for God. And if we can let go of the distracting illusion that having more will make us happy, and share of what we have, we can see that unexpected blessings may gather at our limits, at those holy, liminal places of our lives.
So if it’s hard to imagine moving so abruptly on Ash Wednesday from wanting always more into the faith that God has given us enough, here’s one last image of a door from David Foster Wallace that you might carry along through Lent.
“…Envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens… and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.”
May God grant us a blessed Lent. May we each rediscover our limits, and the blessings that live only there. Amen.