Remember, you are dust. And that’s okay

Welcome to Lent! Today begins our annual 40 day visit to the strange land called “Self Restraint.” Say goodbye to chocolates, sweets, coffee, alcohol, sex, TV, cursing or whatever earthly indulgence you’ve decided to set aside until Easter. I’m praying that you (and I) will have the self-control to spend the energy on Jesus that we normally spend making our human bodies happy.

I woke up this morning with the phrase, “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (GN 3:19) stuck in my head. For those of you who aren’t Catholic, that is what the Priest will say today when he rubs the sign of the cross on my forehead with ashes. It’s a logical thing to wake up thinking about on Ash Wednesday.

 And it’s also a great place to start my spiritual journey. With those words God was reminding Adam (and me) that we were formed from the things of the earth; the dust. And our human bodies are going to return to that earth. Our lives on Earth are temporary.  We are preparing ourselves to live with God in our true home. A big part of that preparation is recognizing our tiny place in this big universe (Yep, that old “H word” humility). There is only one God and I’m not him. But I can live with him if I choose to.

The World doesn’t like it when we think about our mortality. Everything seems to encourage us to strive to live forever on Earth; to be immortals on this planet.  Everything except that little phrase, “Remember, you are dust.”

In small ways this Lent, you and I will turn away from our temporary life and turn toward the much better life that God has prepared for us. I’ll miss my (FILL IN THE BLANK WITH THIS YEAR’S SACRIFICE), but I am looking forward to having a closer look at heaven. It’s okay to be dust.

Lent with Purpose

I was shuffling through old notes and came across some things I wrote down on Ash Wednesday. They provided a good Lenten Pick-Me-(back)-Up.

I don’t usually pay much attention to the Collect at Mass The “Collect,” (in case you, like me, don’t know what the various parts of the Mass are called), is the prayer that the priest says right at the beginning. It’s the first thing that is read right after he says, “Let us Pray.”

For some reason, God had me tuned in as Father Randy read, “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting this campaign of Christian service, so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.” That spiritual opening whistle caught my ear because I’ve been thinking a lot about self-restraint lately. Actually praying about it. Actually, wishing that I had some. Actually, going crazy because most of my life has been entirely defined, driven and determined by a lack of self-restraint.

Today my body and my spirit show the results of five decades of “If it feels good, do it.” And, like the man who drank until he discovered he no longer had the power to quit, I find to my surprise that it’s difficult, no it’s impossible, to just drop those bad habits and pick up new ones without some sort of help. And then out of the blue, the Church offers up this prayer. Lent has a purpose. It’s a “campaign of Christian service.” We’re not just doing battle with our own weakness, “we take up battle against spiritual evils.” And our weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, but “weapons of self-restraint.”

My Lenten sacrifices have a renewed purpose. We’re here to do battle. God knows there is an enemy out there, and that enemy is constantly trying to pull us down to the earth. It’s trying to prevent us from looking up at Heaven by luring our eyes to buffet, the bar, the TV screen, or that attractive person over there. It’s trying to destroy us.

So, pick up your sword and your shield. Turn away from meat on Fridays, desserts on weekdays, trashy movies on weekends, or whatever your weapons of self-restraint may be. Use this 40 days to make yourself spiritually-stronger. We have a world to win.

Improve your Lent with more giving and less giving up

We’ve passed the halfway point between Ash Wednesday and Easter. By my count there are 20 calendar days left. How are you doing? If you’re like me, you’re still hanging onto at least one of your Lenten resolutions, but there are one (or two) others that never really caught on, and that you abandoned somewhere between weeks one and two. Speaking for myself, I hope God won’t be too angry that I couldn’t give up desserts after 8:00 at night. (Don’t ask; it’s a long story involving an ice cream addiction and lactose intolerance…sometimes human biology makes no sense to me at all.)

Being the obedient Catholic that I (try to be and sometimes) am, I spilled my sinful guts to Father during confession. I confessed that I was just too weak to make even that small sacrifice. Oddly, he didn’t seem to care too much about me giving up ice cream. He said, that while he wasn’t trying to tell me what to do, that perhaps it might have been a better idea to resolve to do something good rather than use Lent as an excuse to try out a new diet plan.

Around 750 BC there was an Old Testament prophet named “Hosea.” In Chapter 6 of his book, Hosea told the Israelites that they had their relationship with God all wrong. God didn’t want a pile of bloody, burned sacrifices. God wanted something much greater. God wanted the Israelites to love one another. “For it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than holocausts.” (Hosea 6:6).

This must have been one of Jesus’ favorite OT passages. He cited it twice, first in Matthew 9. He had just sat down to dinner with Matthew the tax-collector and his not-so-saintly friends. The Pharisees questioned Jesus about hanging out with sinners, and he told them to go back to Hosea and “learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

Then again in Matthew 12, the Pharisees were nagging Jesus about his disciples picking and eating grain on the sabbath. Jesus replied, “If you knew what this meant, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned these innocent men. For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.”

I learned somewhere that the Hebrew language used during Jesus’ time did not have “good, better, and best” versions of words. If something was more important, it would be emphasized by repetition. The angels describe God in Revelation by saying, “Holy, holy, holy,” to indicate that He is The Most High. In many places throughout His teaching, Jesus will say, “Truly, truly,” or “amen, amen” to make it clear that His next point is VERY important.

I try not to pretend that I’m a bible scholar (or any kind of scholar for that matter), but perhaps Jesus is trying to do the same thing by citing this passage from Hosea twice. Maybe He wants us to know that He really does want us to focus on mercy, on love, rather than on giving up ice cream. Maybe giving is a more important discipline during Lent than giving up. What do you think?