FROM THE PASTOR
Ash Wednesday
by T.S. Eliot
” Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?……..
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”
(From “Ash Wednesday” by T.S. Eliot)
Dear St. Luke’s partners, The Lord be with you in these holy days. “Ash Wednesday” is known as the poet T.S.Eliot’s “conversion” poem, written after he joined the Anglican church in 1927. It goes deeply into the tension between spiritual barrenness and his hope for salvation of all things. We live in that tension, and on Ash Wednesday bare on our foreheads both brokenness and death, yet cruciform baptismal hope.
Our Lenten journey will be both individual\private, but also communal\public. The text from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew is intensely a call for personal spiritual renewal: not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing; beware of public “showiness;” alms in secret for your Father sees in secret; when you pray go into our room; shut the door; don’t let your fasting be seen by others; your treasure is in heaven.
The text from the book of Joel leads us also to a public, communal Lenten spiritual renewal: call a solemn assembly; assemble the elderly; gather the children and nursing infants; call on God to spare your people.
As we enter this Lenten “Springtime of the Soul” as individuals growing in Christ, we also gather as community, striving to be a healthy community steeped in the ethics and relationships of the Body of Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Life Together” and Martin Luther King’s evocation of “The Beloved Community” give us inspiration in how we aspire to be together as community in our ministries and partnerships.
Lent is all about what kind of a community is emerging at St. Luke. Our Strategic Plan, our Call Process, our life together in liturgy and mission is fertile ground for deepening our Lenten journey in Christ. Lent is a good time for both individual and mutual spiritual growth and discernment. We will be struggling to create healthy community together this side of heaven. Bonhoeffer suggests that when we insist on seeking the “perfect” community, demanding or expecting perfection from the community we are in, or holding on to an illusion of perfection in our community, we are actually doing something that is destructive of genuine Christian community. Why? Because when we bring such expectations of perfection to community we are bringing our own demands as if we and not God were in charge of deciding what matters. As if our sisters and brothers and we ourselves were not broken and sinful people in need of God’s grace.
Bonhoeffer says that we do not to come into community with demands and expectations, but first as thankful recipients of God’s grace. We encounter one another in community with ashes on our foreheads, converted once again, like the poet Eliot, to total dependence of God’s grace. Then the table can be set for conversations of honesty, candor, humility, the give and take of sisters and brothers. Our call to create healthy community wherever our ministries take us, around the corner and across the globe, can only have integrity if we are open to the Spirit’s creation of such community , among ourselves.
May our Lenten journey lead us each closer to Jesus, and all of us as a community of Jesus move deeply rooted in God’s grace and eternal love.
Stephen Paul Bouman,
St. Luke, Chicago, Lent 2023
