A Lenten Meditation

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday is about contingency—not contingency in the technical philosophical sense but the earthbound, timebound lives we live. As we are marked by ashes, the priest says, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” In his conversion poem, “Ash Wednesday,” T. S. Eliot, catches the contingency of the human condition:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place. . ..

Contingency is the human condition.

For a long time humans have entertained the idea that we are only apparently earthly, contingent. Our flesh is merely the clothing in which we make our way through life. In truth, so goes this idea, we are immortals, subject neither to time nor place. One day our immortal soul will be at last released from our contingent bodies, and we will fly to our true destinies. But this idea, dubious on biblical and theological grounds, denies what is essential and precious in the human experience.

To be human is to be bounded. Our lives have an arc, a storyline. They begin and end. This gives to human experience its weight. We have but one life to live. We cannot imagine it otherwise. Even if we posit an endless heaven, we imagine it in earthly terms, as a long continuation of the life we now live. Were our days endless would not they lose their savor? If every day were like every other day, if there were only day and not night, would we be human?

The answer to the last question from Genesis 3 is no. Genesis 3, written in the literary context of similar Mesopotamian stories, is that there are three possibilities for humanity. One is animal life. We share bodies with animals, the story notes (Genesis 2:7 and 2:20), but there remains a gap between us and the animals. We name them; they do not name us. The animals in the story have life but lack “the knowledge of good and bad.” This possibility, the shared life of animals, proves inadequate for the first human (2:20).

A second possibility is divinity. Divine beings have both endless life and “the knowledge of good and bad.” It’s divine knowledge that the serpent promises to Eve (3:5) and that Yhwh God denies to human beings (3:22). This possibility is foreclosed to us.

The third possibility is the one we know: sharing our bodies with the other animals and our minds with divinity. As the psalm has it: 

What are humans that you have them in mind?
The human race that you have appointed them:
that you have made them lack little from divinity,
that you have crowned them with glory and honor,
that you have appointed them to rule the work of your hands,
that you have set all creatures under their feet. . .. (Psalm 8:5-7)

We are, thus, contingent beings with divine powers. This is our promise and our peril. It’s to the acknowledgement of this life that Ash Wednesday calls us: “You are dust, and to dust you will return.”

But there is another note in Ash Wednesday, the soft note of that which is not contingent. The note of grace. According to the Apostle Paul we presently live in two contingencies: death and sin. These emerged with our first ancestors. This is not only the story that Paul tells, in Romans 5 and elsewhere, but that science tells us. With the emergence of human consciousness, we became aware of our finitude, that we die. And we became aware of that we are inextricably caught in a web of deceit and cruelty and violence. These are the contingencies with which we live. The question the apostle asks is whether there is an alternative, a life not determined by death and sin, a human life beyond these contingencies.

The answer the apostle gives is that the possibility of such a life does not lie within us, within our human capacities. We are caught in a cascade of consequences: one thing leads to another. And the consequences pile up in war and violence and global heat and ever-fiercer storms and corruption and death. The biblical word for this is “wrath.” The wrath spreads. How to stop the cascade of consequences? At the Ash Wednesday service I attended, the preacher said that it’s up to us. Repent. Turn around. He said that we should not wait for God. 

He was partly right. Ash Wednesday calls us to stop, to stop doing the things of death. In Paul’s gospel, this is our participation in the cross of Jesus Christ. It’s dying to those things that add to the world’s toll of sorrow. 

Or trying to stop. Hard as we try, we can’t entirely step outside of the machinery of death. Adria and I try not to use plastics in the profligate way they are used in our economy, but it’s a losing battle. And in this way, Paul warns us, lies the sort of self-righteousness that contributes in its own way to the sorrows of the world.

Stopping is not enough. Repentance, though a necessary part of Lent, is not enough. The preacher at the Ash Wednesday service thought it was all we have: stop, get it right, fix what we have damaged. He called out those theologians of original sin, Augustine and Calvin, and declared himself on the side of original blessing. What he missed was both the honest despair and fierce hope in the likes of Augustine, Calvin, and Paul.

The despair is over our ever getting it right. We keep adding to the great river of earthly sorrows. Each century seems worse than the last. It is tempting to despair, but despair is not a strategy. The chain of contingencies will not be interrupted by throwing up our hands. We need more. Our Ash Wednesday vow to stop is only a partial answer, inadequate to the evil of the world. We need a grace that is not contingent, that doesn’t depend on us.

The biblical name for this is resurrection. Consider the story of Jesus of Nazareth. He preaches, guides, heals, points out of way of life that, if followed, would bring healing to those who follow it. And then the great river of consequences floods over him and buries him. He dies on Roman cross, the death of state criminal. If the story stops there, the message is as the preacher had it: it’s up to us, and good luck with that. But it’s not the end of the story. Into the contingencies of Jesus’s life comes non-contingent, comes resurrection. His life raised up, restored.

It is this hope that we find in Augustine and Calvin and Paul. It’s this hope that we look for on Ash Wednesday and in all of Lent: that all our contingencies will be swallowed up in the non-contingent, death in resurrection.

We do not know exactly what this means. At least, I do not know. But this hope has its own consequences. It means that what we try to build, inadequate and fragile as it always is, is not doomed to destruction but will be raised up. We can work hard precisely because it doesn’t depend on us. We can do those seemingly quixotic things that Christians do—feeding the hungry, freeing the prisoner, seeking justice, not using plastics—not because we will be successful but because we trust that our small and contingent actions will be—no, are—caught up in what is not contingent.

And so on Ash Wednesday, we accept the ashes gladly. We are dust, and to the dust we will return. But the dust is not forgotten.

Clay