Return to Me

It's Ash Wednesday and I'm 33.  Which leads me to a rather morbid remembering of when I was 20 and I loved a song by David Wilcox called "Glory,"  which begins with the lyric, "I'd be dead by 32, if that was my best guest, and yet here I am this morning, singing 'happy birthday to me' as I clean up all this mess, because I'm left still alive without warning." The chorus continues on in an even more "upbeat" manner: "In the big boring middle of my long book of life, after the twist has been told, if you don't die in glory at the age of Christ, then your story is just getting old."

For your own uplifting Ash Wednesday moment, you can listen to "Glory" yourself at https://myspace.com/davidwilcoxsite/music/song/glory-39838151-42238980 and think of how old you're getting (or how much time you have left to get your life together before it all gets old).

Yet, there is hope.  Throughout Lent the readings from the Common Lectionary take us on a tour of the Prophets who God sent to the people of Israel in the midst of some of their darkest moments:  the time preceding, during, and directly after the Babylonian Exile.  In 587 BCE the Babylonian army invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the city, burned the Temple and marched the people off to a foreign land.  Which brings me to another one of my favorite songs from my early 20s:  Sublime's "Rivers of Babylon"  (http://www.last.fm/music/Sublime/_/Rivers+Of+Babylon) whose lyrics come from Psalm 137: "By the rivers of Babylon there we sat weeping when we remembered Zion . . .  How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137:1, 4)

Before the exile, the Prophets (among them Jeremiah, 1st Isaiah, and Amos) admonished the people to return to their covenant relationship with God and to live lives of justice where the widow, orphan and alien are protected.  Once in exile, though, it is the Prophets who remind the people that even though it seems they have lost everything (Temple, homeland, king) their ever faithful God is with them and has not abandoned them.  Isaiah proclaims, "Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb?  Even should she forget, I will never forget you" (49:15).

In 539 BCE when the people are allowed to return to Israel to rebuild, the Prophets continue to remind them of God's love and kindness, and of their duty to the covenant.  It is in this context Joel tells the people in today's 1st Reading, "Even now, return to me with your whole heart" (2:12).  Even after everything the people of Israel have endured in the past 50+ years,  Joel reminds them that God is always ready to welcome them into full relationship with him.   Even now, at the age of 33, with all of my faults and failings and imperfections (and with the knowledge, that this morning on the first day of Lent I hollered at my 5 year-old as we rushed out the door for the bus and he stood screaming on the steps that he couldn't breathe in his balaclava "Well just take it off then!") I am invited to return with my whole heart to the God of Creations who humbled himself to be born, live and die as we all do, in order to invite us all into a life beyond the finality of death.

And what does it mean, to return with my whole heart?  In his book, The Holy Longing, (which is so profound that in five years I've only ever made it through the first two chapters before I've had to put it away so I can just think about it), Ronald Rohlheiser writes, "Soren Kirkegaard once defined a saint as someone who can will the one thing" (8).  What is this ability, this discipline to will the one thing?  How can I orient my entire life, like a sunflower following the light across the horizon, to the great gift of Life itself and the author of Creation, while eschewing everything else?

In my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Level 3 training for becoming a catechist for 9 to 12 year-olds we worked through many Old Testament Bible Studies.  One of them was on the "Story of the Fall," Genesis chapter 3, where Eve eats the apple and all hell breaks loose.  Despite the fact that I had read this passage many times, along with the other women at the training, we were mistaken when our trainer Ann Garrido asked us about which tree is in the middle of the Garden of Eden.  Pointing to the verse where Eve tells the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die" (3:2b-3).  Gently, Ann directed us back to our Bible Study from the previous day on the 2nd account of creation where it is written "Out of the ground the Lord God made grow every tree that was delightful to look at and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (2:9).  And so the question became, What tree was in the middle of Eve's garden?  Where was her focus and her energy, on the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?  Where is mine?

And so today, even now, in the midst of everyday life, minutiae and brokenness, the invitation is issued again, "return to me with your whole heart."  And that is a journey that takes a lifetime, as David Wilcox comes around to at the end of his song:  "If you don't die in glory at the age of Christ, then your story is still coming true."  What tree is in the middle of your garden?