The Audacity of Lent

Today I was blindsided by the very real truth that my children are indeed growing up. And, even though the years blink by with the temptation to make me believe that these children are mine, the audacity of Lent reminds me that they most certainly are not.  The definition of audacity is the willingness to do or say something boldly, despite the risk of criticism, failure, or disapproval. I’d wager a guess that it’s safe to say Lent is one of the more audacious seasons of the liturgical year.

Satan did a very good job today. His wrath is subtle.  It first shows up in distractions, then misappropriations, and finally blame games that wreak havoc on even the most structurally sound Catholic families.  He fought like literal hell to keep us from Ash Wednesday mass.  He knows that if we can forget the ashes, we can forget the Lord, we can forget Creation, and we can forget the grace of the eternal that waits for us with the choirs that sing His name. If we can forget all of this, then we can let the poisonous pride of the enemy seep right into the cracks of our human foundations where it can live and fester and boil from the bones out until we infect others around us.  This is his mission, to use us like puppets, as he is a lazy bum.  If he can get us to forget the real truth of the Lord’s heart, he then gets us to forget about communicating this real truth to others.  And the black tar of the enemy just bleeds into us and out again until we are consumed by the comforts of the world.  He is a cunning, baffling, powerful, lazy bum.  But he is only as strong as we allow him to be.  

Our faith is like the Zheng Qi in Chinese medicine.  In theory, there are many types of qi in TCM.  This particular type of qi, Zheng Qi, is also known as the “Central Qi.”  In western terms, it’s our immune system, our lymphatic system, and our endocrine system all rolled into one giant powerhouse of protection.  The strength of this qi lies in our ability to ward off pathogens that would otherwise make us sick.  The irony in the strength of the Zheng Qi lies in its behavior when faced with the prospect of threat.  The intensity of a person’s ailing symptoms actually amplifies in a sick person who has a strong zheng qi.  In short, a strong reaction to a cold pathogen is indicative of a healthy Zheng Qi.  A weak reaction, the opposite.  Isn’t that a bummer?  This response and display is literally the battle between pathogen and immunity that shows its face in the mirror of an afflicted person. 

And, so it goes, that I have also found that the stronger the faith within a family (ie: the “zheng qi” of their relationship with each other and the Lord), the stronger the attack from the devil and, incidentally, the stronger the battle between those two forces. The enemy loves to be sneaky.  Not because he is smart (which he is) but because he is lazy.  The more subtle he is, the often sinister conniving methods that would otherwise be reserved for the atheist world to keep people hidden deep in the soup of pride–these are unleashed onto the family, especially when readying for one of the most important masses of the year.  A docile family lukewarm in their faith is nearly there, where he wants them, so he doesn’t put up much of a fight.  In due time, they will be on his team.  They don’t go to confession hardly ever, they sporadically attend mass, they certainly don’t pray as a family, and they don’t remember scripture.  These are the families that FEEL safe.  The toxic belief that they make good money, wear good clothes, and enjoy good lives, is catnip to Satan’s plan.  He can’t resist assisting these families into thinking that “they’ve got it all covered.”  The ones who have it made in the shade are in the most danger of the false belief that they don’t need anyone but themselves, that they don’t need Christ.  And so a family that prays together, attends weekly mass preceded by regular confession and regular reception of the Eucharist, talks about scripture, includes the concept of God in nearly every conversation…those families are attacked.  Because the devil knows that if he can get between members of these types of families, he can tempt them to believe their faith is not real, that it doesn’t mean anything, that mass is a nuisance, the host is just flour and water, the wine is just old grapes.  If he can get the members of families like these to balk and beckon at the black tar of insult, blasphemy, rage baits, and sulking self pity, then he is gaining traction.  Families need to know this.  Those fights between your kids over who took the skirt, where they left their shoes, how that insult from three years ago still stings, those fights between parents who are just trying to get to mass on time, the ones that seep into the once beautiful Sunday momentum creating inertia, friction, heat, and struggle, those are the details through which Satan works.  And those are the details, if you’ve done this a while, that you learn to notice so you can let the Lord in.  It doesn’t always work perfectly.  But the promise remains.  The Lord abides and fights for us.  And we can rest in Him and be still.

It’s Ash Wednesday, not to be mistaken for Good Friday, although both of these memorials insist on illuminating the truth of the Passion from either end of its event, and this mother is overcome with grief.  It’s an annual grief, but very present indeed, in that I am acutely reminded and aware of just how serious this business of achieving eternal life really is.  Hell is real everyone.  It is crazy real.  It is not up for debate.  To debate it at all is actually deadly.  Let’s get that through our heads.

We are destined for hell, born into a world of darkness which is ruled by the evil one all because of his lazy plan to destroy the Creation of God.  Every single one of us deserves hell by the merit of sheer concupiscense alone, the fate of the garden.  Interestingly, the google docs program on which I am initially writing this categorizes the word concupiscense as an unrecognizable and incorrectable amalgam of arbitrary letters as it lies there among the paragraph, quietly minding its own business, while google tries to scarlet letter it with its invasive red zig zagged underline attacking the page like a rude insult.  Even the best of software is not taught to recognize our deep propensity to sin, setting us up for more distraction, more denial, more justification for our malfeasance.  And yet, still with all of our foolish ways, there is massive promise which rises way up out of the ashes of the finite world and into the realms of infinity beyond sight, where the heart of Christ mercifully beats for us before, within, and beyond the limited boxes of time.  We are promised this eternal life, right there, beneath the mantle of the woman who gave her life for the King who created himself and then let us kill him, unjustly, for a punishment that we deserve.  Right there in the bosom of Christ, eternally held the way we hold each other after violence, or desolation, or homesickness, or crime, can be found his unwavering promise.  We are born of ash and to ash we shall return.  We are nothing if not animated by our soul, the image of which is His, not ours.  We are nothing if not for the breath in our bones that has been intricately placed there by the Creator who watches us destroy it for the next tempting pleasure, the next fleeting comfort.  

So I return to the thinking of these children.  These children who do not belong to me, even though I trick myself into believing otherwise because the thought of the actual gravity behind the real truth of eternity can sometimes feel so huge and heavy that I have a propensity to just check all the way out.  Today, we were attacked.  By distraction, by illness, by exhaustion, and by the lack of routine that provides one of the most unbearable double edge swords ever–winter “break.”  Satan loves breaks.  Especially during winter when we are already plagued with darker days, frigid air, grayer skies, and missed alarms.  Winter is where things go to die.  Things like tree leaves, gnats and bugs, the flow of water, the motivation of responsibility, the hope of color, the inspiration for better days.  In New England, winter is especially acrimonious.  We are first tempted by the descending temperature and crispy ingredients of fall, tricking ourselves into believing that the world will always be like this, dressed up in colors no paint or pixel can reproduce, awake in the balmy breezes that kiss our scarved necks, and glistening brows.  And then, with the force of a falling tree in the forest which no one can hear for miles, winter collapses into the world like an iceberg, first with the beauty of snow we forgot from last year and the newly cleaned fireplaces that bring us the promise of warm retreating gold, and then with the pain of waiting, the monument of cabin fever, and the ever so subtle distracting lie that whispers, “this is all your life will ever be.”

It’s tough out there, folks.  And the devil knows it.  My children, the ones I’ve been gifted by the Lord to raise, are my entire life.  And I love it.  I realize each mother mothers in her own way, much like snowflakes each take their own route from cloud to earth without nary a fracture to their unique crystals.  God created those too, the crystals.  Remember that.  Anyway, today my children were preparing for our annual Ash Wednesday service.  This is the service where we are reminded to repent and believe in the gospel.  And, since we ever so deeply believe in the truth of every word in that very gospel, Satan often shows up when we are preparing to go hear it.  First, we were hammered by a few procrastination techniques which plague every human and then the misplacement of things.  Not THOSE things, but THESE things, and THOSE things are not substitute for the THESE things that the children were hoping to find.  They are embroiled in the lie that they must look perfect to show up for the ashes that will be spread on their head which are identical to the ashes from which they were made and to which they will return.  Alas, though, the present moment is filled with darkness and suddenly the thoughts of sister thieves and betrayals and iniquities begin to cloud the forefront of their minds so that we all forget the gospel entirely and begin shouting blasphemies at each other.  At this time, the parents are involved saying things that should be reserved for the confessional and the car ride becomes a ceremonious beratement of sorts leaving all inhabitants of the vehicle stifled and deflated by the assault of unmeant words that cannot be stuffed back into their original mouth containers.

To dust you shall return.

And yet, we made it.  Not without my weeping in the passenger seat hoping to be able to pull it together enough to make it through the doors without anyone asking me what was wrong, not without all 5 of us walking in silence down that rainy cold path, the insult of old snow staring up at us without realizing it had overstayed its welcome, and not without the sudden realization that we are in public now and the mess of the car needs to stay in the car, even though we are high on the adrenaline of the push, the fight, the confusion of “what did she say to me?  What did I say to her?”  They say your children will show you yourselves. And show you they do.  They also say you will grow up to repeat the patterns of your parents and, despite trying as I might and 30 years of therapy attempting at preventing this, here we are.  And still, the enemy.  He smiles as we fight and cry, throw figurative fists and literal slaps, scream, stomp feet, kick in car air conditioning vents.  He smiles.  He feels like he is winning.  But HE has a crappy memory.  He forgets, over and again, that the battle has already been won.  As we shuffle into the church, we soften.  We bathe our forehead in holy water and kneel before the king feeling washed at once from the brazenness of our incredibly sinful transport to this church.  It is there, in the tabernacle, where time becomes past, present, and future…omnipresent at once.  It is there, in the veiled brass where Christ is alive.  And we know it.  Our souls remember why we are here.  

To dust you shall return.  

I’ll admit, I was tempted to believe the things my daughters said to me.  I was tempted to believe the things I said to them.  In an instant, blinded by the seemingly apparent knowledge of WHO I was, I forgot WHOSE I was.  And that is the cunning, baffling, powerful nature of the enemy.  His whole M.O. is grounded in his own pride, in his own forgetting of who he was.  And he paid the ultimate price.  Remember, if satan could kill God, he would.  But he can’t.  So he goes after us.  God’s creation.  He knows that if he can split up families, they will scatter like marbles over the curves of the thorny world that will eat them whole if they let it.  He is every deadly sin on steroids all rolled into one giant shadow that lurks behind half truths which attempt to trick us to deflect and distract from the One Big Truth that, by our baptisms, we belong to the One True God.  I’m lucky my faith is with me and that the Lord gives us the virtue of fortitude.  Because it was in that mass where I remembered.  In that mass was where the pain fell away like silk. In that mass, I was taken into the embrace of the Lord’s loving arms and reminded that I am nothing and, to Him, that is everything. 

To dust you shall return.  

Today I was tempted to give up, to become complacent, to stop parenting, to leave it all up to them to figure out.  I do too much.  I don’t do enough.  This is the plague of the “dropped in” mother.  She is too much and not enough all at once for her family.  She can’t quite find the happy medium that allows her to exist without anxiety, intrusiveness to those around her, and peaceful joy.  She is stressed and ridiculed, praised and appreciated, desperate and sad.  She is regularly assaulted by the Father of Lies because he knows that if he breaks her down, he breaks her family down.  If left to her own worldly devices she is tempted to believe the lies (even though she is the queen of parenting books, of natural toys, of homemade baby food, home birth, play based school, nature walks, and screen free homes) which scream at her that somehow she is providing a future professional one very juicy salary to right the psychology of her children that she is currently dismantling with her flaws.  It’s easy to believe that lie and forget the truth.  The truth that started with a fiat so loud it ricocheted off of a young girl and into the deep where it changed the entire course of the universe.   The truth that her children indeed do not belong to her.  The truth that she is called to steward these very souls on the long journey of battle to the bosom of the Holy Lord awaiting at the gates.  This forgetting is not her fault, especially in this day and age.  It seems that the internet and cell phones were almost directly invented to dismantle the sanity of mothers.  They do a good job.  We are more distracted than ever as we watch our hearts walk around outside of our bodies, sending them to schools and camps and sports and arts all the live long day without nary a missed beat.  

To dust you shall return

I forget.  I forget this.  This simplicity of creation.  It really is so simple, right?  I sat in this mass and received my ashes not with shame or disappointment but with reconciliation because, at the end of the day, I want Him.  I want to touch His face and wash His feet, feel His wounds and hold His hands.  And as I watch each of my children also receive the black cross smear across their foreheads, I could see them want that too.  

To dust you shall return.

This is the task, my friends.  This world is not our home.  The battle is raging beneath the thin veil as we are tempted to believe that this is all our lives will ever be–the unpaid bills, the unfixed housewares, the broken cars, the student loans and credit card debts.  It’s so plausible that this is all our lives will ever be.  But take a step back and zoom out.  He is waiting for you.  He weeps with you and laughs with you.  He keeps your heart close to His and listens to your wailing cries.  He is faithful and never ever leaves.  Even when we want him to because our shame is so thick over the circus of our wandering minds and deceptive hearts.  He is there.  Always waiting for the invitation to help us.  The war has been won.  The Lord wants to share the banquet feast.  Go out into the world and refuse to live in the shadows of the grudge, the despair of the repeated argument, the disappointment of recurring habits.  Embrace the discomfort that comes with choosing Him.  Be weird.  Be honest.  Be pure.  And live your life in a way that recognizes the very real fact that to dust you shall return.  It’s inside the ashes where we are stripped down of the muck and mire of sin and fall to the floor at His feet. It’s inside the ashes that our souls become free to rise up and join the eternal feast.  It’s inside those sweet, soft, black little ashes where we remember our nothingness and in that remembering, we are shown our everythingness.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.  Now go.  See Jesus in everyone.  Be Jesus to everyone.  And may the light always shine on your face.  I’ll see you in the ashes.  I’ll meet you at the foot of the cross.