Ashes, Love, and Emptiness

For a lot of people, the fact that today wasn’t just Valentine’s Day but Ash Wednesday escaped their notice entirely.

For those that did notice, it probably seemed like an irony. Maybe a bit of a downer.

But as I sit here at the end of a holiday I didn’t really celebrate, and the beginning of a fasting season I didn’t mark today in the way I normally do (ashes on my forehead), I find myself wondering something. Is the focus of these two days — one a holiday, one a fast — really that different?

Sure, at the surface level, they couldn’t be more different. Valentine’s day is a feast — both in the Church and in general society. Ash Wednesday, and the Lenten season, is a fast. In one, we are called to celebrate indulgence in romantic love, often marked by indulgence in sweets and other pleasures. In the other, we are called to remember restraint, to remember our mortality — “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” We are called to sit in sober, maybe even somber, silence.

I’ll be honest. I’ve always found the Lenten season, emotionally, to be something of a burden. I feel conflicted about observing it. I am a naturally sensitive and introspective person. I do almost nothing without intentionality. So the atmosphere of sober reflection, of repentance, of fasting and dwelling on mortality, sin, and generally all the things most people try to forget about themselves…I find it heavy. In some ways, I don’t know if it is exactly what I need.

But every year for the past five or six years, I have observed the season in some way. A big reason is that I find that after a period of sober reflection, the celebrations of the Easter season are so much more vivid, exhilarating, joyous. I cannot express to you the all-encompassing joy I felt the first year I observed all of the season between Ash Wednesday and Easter — everything: Ash Wednesday, Lent, the dark weekend before Easter where we remember Jesus’ long sufferings and death, the silent empty Saturday before Easter Sunday. And then, the Vigil.

That year, I attended the Vigil at Franciscan University. It began at 8:00 pm Saturday evening — which in liturgical time is really the beginning of Sunday, the Lord’s Day. It began in darkness and silence. The darkness and silence we had all been feeling for more than 40 days since Ash Wednesday — and felt so acutely from the grief-stricken memorials of Christ’s suffering and death that weekend. In the Catholic and Anglican tradition, we don’t even say the word “alleluia” during that period. Ever. Not even on Sundays. We began in that silence, like a tomb, and then the priest, who stood outside in the darkness over a fire pit, lit the Christ Candle, the candle representing the light of Christ coming into the dark world.

We all stood silently, gripping our little wax candles in our hands like children, some thousand or so of us craning our necks to see him when he entered the dark room with the light of Christ. And he chanted those words as he processed through our midst, holding that great candle aloft: “The Light of Christ.” And we responded, expectantly, “Thanks be to God.” As he moved, the light spread from the Christ candle to each of our little candles, and the darkness diminished. When he reached the front, the service began, and the various readers from the congregation took turns coming up and reading from Scripture the story of the human race, of our fall into darkness, of the many times God reached in to rescue us and to teach us, to prepare us for the moment when he would deliver us decisively. We would sing psalms together in between readings.

In the climactic moment when the Gospel was read, when the congregation together sang “Alleluia” for the first time and the priest held the Gospel book aloft in announcement of the Good News of Christ, I felt my deliverance. By then, the lights had fully come up. The musicians filled the room with clamorous and joyful music. When he read the words “he is risen, just as he said,” I felt that I, too, had risen with him. After that, we celebrated communion together — now a joyful feast, not a solemnity. We sang and celebrated and rejoiced. We welcomed new members, young and old, into the family of God. When the service concluded, it was past midnight and I was exhausted but filled with a joy I’d never known before. As a child I had always thought Easter was a nice remembrance of Jesus not really being dead, having some cool divine superpowers. I hadn’t realized it was a celebration of the resurrection of the entire universe — including my own resurrection. I hadn’t realized that Christ had entered my death, my isolation, guilt, and suffering, and burst it open from within. That year, Easter was a celebration of my own resurrection. I was filled with life.

So I think, when I observe Lent, it’s because feeling my mortality prepares me to feel my deliverance. Not just hear about it, but experience it. In times when I have been less observant, I felt I did not experience that joy in quite the same way.

So what’s this I was saying at first about Lent and Valentine’s day not really being all that different?

It’s this.

A lot of times, we as a society focus on the fluffy parts of love. The easy parts, the leisurely and effortless parts. And those things are all very good and very real.

But the thing is, love is something a whole lot more soul-altering and demanding than that. I think, for anyone that has ever loved deeply in any way (romantic or not), that’s really what makes it so powerful. That’s what gives depth and dimension to the fluffy parts.

Love is about being laid bare, not just in a sexual way, but actually at the heart of who you are. It means not just vulnerability, but also sometimes tearing open your deepest self, hurting very deeply, emptying yourself because you love another person so damn much. It’s a choosing to give of yourself, to bleed, and the thing is that it’s totally willing. It’s really a very mysterious and God-like thing, I find. Pain is not something any of us want to feel. And when we feel pain because of, or on behalf of, someone we love, it often hurts that much more. And yet, it’s something we all willingly choose. It’s certainly not because we want to feel that way. There’s something sacrificial about it. And that’s not just with romantic love.

Jon Foreman is one of the main songwriters in a band I love called Switchfoot. And when I think of this dimension of love, I always think of the lyrics in one of their songs, “Yet.” He sings,

Yeah, if it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love

No if it doesn’t break your heart it’s not enough

It’s when you’re breaking down with your insides coming out

That’s when you find out what your heart is made up of.

And so love is about emptying yourself to be filled, and to fill up another. And that’s also what Lent is about. It’s about being laid bare. It’s about no more pretenses, about becoming small and vulnerable. It’s about choosing to accept the pain of need, of inadequacy, and about giving up wants in an attempt to clear the way for greater love for others. Ultimately it’s self-denial, self-emptying, to leave room within yourself to receive God’s love and life and to accept deliverance from your enslaved state. Only by dying do we live. Only be giving our life do we receive it.

Love and sacrifice, in the end, are very intimately connected. Just as I feel the joy of resurrection so much more keenly when I have felt the desolation of Lent — so, too, do we truly revel in the joys and celebrations of love when we have embraced sacrifice and difficulty for the sake of one another. Christ stepped into our pain, our emptiness, our feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, and broke them open from within by filling them with his soul-altering, life-giving love. And so we, too, find our life and deepest love in the same way.

I still have mixed feelings about Lent, as it affects me personally. It’s still a journey for me, and I’m still learning how I best grow spiritually. This year and last, I was more gentle in my observance. Maybe another year will be different. But the point, I think, remains the same regardless.

At the end of this post, I’m sharing a song that I always have loved but always found enigmatic. I think, now, that maybe this is exactly what it’s talking about. So I leave you with a love song that is strangely appropriate for a season of Lent.

Happy Valentine’s Day.