Ash Wednesday
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God,
For God is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love,
and relenting in punishment
~ Joel 2:13
One of the changes that was set in motion at Vatican II was the renaming and revising of the sacrament of reconciliation, previously and colloquially called confession. Although an integral part of the sacrament, confession was meant to be just one step in the dance of reconciliation. The focus was never supposed to be how bad we are but how good God is. The emphasis was misplaced. The purpose of the sacrament was not to dead end at confession but rather to be reminded of the largesse of God’s heart. The point of the sacrament of reconciliation, which is the point of all sacraments, is to become aware of and experience the extravagant love and tender mercy of God.
This shift is supported by today’s first reading. I have always loved the reading from Joel 2 that is proclaimed at the Ash Wednesday liturgy. While it clearly reminds us of the importance of prayerfully and consciously taking stock of our relationship with God and others, it makes it clear that we can come as we are to God because God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and disinterested in punishing us.
Rather than deleting sin from our spiritual inventory, as if we were not unfinished symphonies complicit in the cacophony that drowns out the song of God, a wholistic spirituality is one that has an honest, mature, personal, and social understanding of sin. But it also emphasizes how deeply, madly, and unconditionally God loves us. Imagine your deepest human relationships. When you have been truly seen and broken open by the wild, undying love of another it evokes the desire to love that person in return not the desire to abuse the mystery of that inexplicable good fortune. So, of course we weep and mourn when we become conscious of how we fail to love just as we weep and laugh joyfully when we love wholeheartedly. If it is this way in human-to-human relationships, then how much more so in our relationship with the source and giver of life in whom we live and move and have our being?
Lest we are confused, the spiritual inventory of Lent always boils down to this question? How’s your love life?♦
djm