Give me Life in Your Way

3LentC, Sullivan Park Care Center, March 3, 2013 by Annette Fricke

            Teachers and parents are assigned the awesome duty of instructing children about life and what is needed to sustain life.  My brother and I would sometimes find a caterpillar in the yard outside and wanted to put it in a jar and bring it inside.  Such things were discouraged, that and picking flowers.  My dad objected to picking flowers to bring inside because they last longer if they remain outside.  The same was basically true for bringing in other things from the outside.  My mother would have to remind us that we needed to poke holes in the top of a jar so the caterpillar could breathe.  The caterpillar needed oxygen.  But, at the same time, we couldn’t make the holes too big, or they would escape.  In the early 1960s, my dad was transitioning from chickens for his egg business to chickens only for the purpose of having meat and eggs for the family.  I vaguely remember a time when we went to the feed store to purchase baby chicks.  All it required for transport was a box with holes in it.  The holes provided the needed oxygen so the chicks could breathe.  If they didn’t have that, they could suffocate and die.  No chicks meant no future chickens and no future eggs.

            Today is the third Sunday in Lent.  There are three things that come to mind when most people think about Lent and they are fasting, repentance, and giving something up for Lent.  The seminary I attended in Ohio thought fasting to be particularly repugnant.  After all, Jesus didn’t seem to observe fasting and when you are in most grad schools in the US, the one thing that most students will not give up is drinking.  I went to an ethnically German seminary and they were not about to give up beer and bratwurst; not happening. Although I don’t recall which seminary professor said it, he said that we should get it out of our system, because it would not be tolerated in the parish. We did not understand the full impact of that statement just as when I was a child, I did not understand what would happen if holes were not poked into the boxes and jars of living creatures.  Perhaps the clerical collars most of us were happy to wear at the time would at some point make us feel that we were choking.  One of the times when I feel the most helpless as a nursing assistant is when someone begins to choke or aspirate in the dining room.  Internally, I panic.  I know now how vital it is to get air to the lungs.  

            The three lessons before us today can be summarized by just two phrases: the mystery of suffering and the mystery of holiness.  Jesus gives us examples of things that may or may not have actually happened, but one thing is for sure: Jesus points out that people who suffer death and disease are no more sinners than anyone else.  We are all equal before God.  Paul makes the same point when he states that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  Here we are again, we feel helpless.  On Ash Wednesday, we hear the words, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”  We are all mortal; that part will never change no matter how much we may want change.  All our lives, we are caught between heaven and earth, the finite and the infinite.  Our minds and our hearts take us in two seemingly opposite directions. How do we reach holiness when we are filled with sinfulness?  How do we get right with God?  Paul says that the Corinthians have presumed upon God’s mercy by assuming they are privileged because they have been baptized and have the sacrament of the altar.  They now suppose to live as they please.  Paul says this is not so.  Not true.  Jesus says, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  Paul says that the loving God has given us life, and expects us to produce fruits.  If the fruit is not produced, then judgment will come. Yet Jesus says that God is forbearing and will yet give time for the fruit to be produced.  It remains a paradox and the only solution the Church has come up with is this: repent.  The only way to God is through repentance, continual repentance; daily and moment by moment repentance. As in the liturgical writings of the Church throughout the ages, whether coming before God privately in confession, or within the worshipping community, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.  Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. O Christ, thou Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world; grant us your peace.

            From an Eastern Church liturgy, “Accept the fountain of my tears, O Powerful One who draws down from the clouds the waters of the sea.  Incline to the groaning of my heart, O Merciful One whose self-emptying has bowed down the heavens.  I shall kiss your most pure feet and wipe them with the hairs of my head, those feet whose sound Eve heard at dusk in paradise, and hid herself for fear.  Who can search out the multitude of my sins and the depths of your judgment, O Savior of my soul?  Despise not, your handmaiden, for you alone have mercy without measure!”

            Mark Searle writes, “The purpose of the first part of Lent is to bring us to compunction.  The word compunction is related to the infinitive, to puncture and suggests the deflation of our inflated egos, a challenge to any self-deceit about the quality of our lives as disciples of Jesus.  By hitting us again and again with demands which we not only fail to obey, but which we come to recognize as being quite beyond us, the gospel passages are meant to trouble us, to confront our illusions about ourselves. “Remember that you are dust…” From this perspective, Lenten penance may be more effective if we fail in our resolutions than if we succeed, for its purpose is not to confirm us in our sense of virtue but to bring home to us our radical need of salvation.”

            Thomas Merton writes on this same subject of compunction, “Compunction is a baptism of sorrow, in which the tears of the penitent are a psychological but also deeply religious purification, preparing and disposing him or her for the sacramental waters of baptism or for the sacrament of penance.  Such sorrow brings joy because it is at once a mature acknowledgment of guilt and the acceptance of its full consequences: hence it implies a religious and moral adjustment to reality, the acceptance of one’s actual condition and the acceptance of reality is always a liberation from the burden of illusion.”  From Monastic liturgy, “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless; give me life in your way.”

            Caterpillars need oxygen.  Baby chicks need oxygen. Just as creatures both great and small need oxygen in the air to breathe, so we need God to punch holes into our hearts, to deflate out egos, to challenge any self-deceit about the quality of our lives as disciples of Jesus, and to breathe into us the life-giving spirit and grace that only you, God, can give.

            Again from the Eastern Church liturgy, “I was entrusted with a sinless and living land, but I sowed the ground with sin and reaped with a sickle the ears of laziness; in thick sheaves I garnered my actions, but winnowed them not on the threshing-floor of repentance.  I beg you, my God, the eternal farmer, with the wind of your loving-kindness winnow the chaff of my works, and grant to my soul the harvest of forgiveness; shut me in your heavenly storehouse, and save me!” “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless; give me life in your way.”