February 22, 2012 | 12:10 p.m. | Ash Wednesday

A Meditation for Ash Wednesday

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 41:17b–36
Matthew 6:19–21

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off the straight path.

Dante Alighieri wrote these words almost 700 years ago. They begin The Divine Comedy, his masterpiece poem that recounts his journey through the Inferno, on to Purgatory, and finally to Paradise. I read them for the first time in twelfth grade honors English out of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. I have since learned that this introduction is one of the more famous ones in medieval literature, but I took no notice of it back then.

Our lives and the world in which we live are much different than Dante’s; Inferno is in many ways a foreign text to us; and I almost decided not to begin with it, thinking people might find it irrelevant. But whether they come from an epic poem hundreds of years old or this morning’s newspaper, how can one ignore such words? Any one of us knows well the feeling that, somewhere along the journey of our lives, we have wandered from the path we should be following and that we need to find our way back. We have made a mistake; we have messed it all up; and we wonder if we will be able to fix things, or if it is just too late.

I find it even more convicting to read Dante’s lines that come next, as he describes the way he feels, surrounded by the inescapable knowledge that he has wandered off the path: “a bitter place!” he writes. “Death could scarce be bitterer.”

And then he continues: “But if I would show the good that came of it, I must talk about things other than the good” (Dante, Inferno, I. 1–9).

None of us like to admit or discuss the ways or the times when we have wandered off the path, betrayed God’s best hopes for us, and let ourselves down. It is frightening when we discover that we are lost or that we are not the person we once imagined ourselves to be. It is frightening when we discover that the world in which we live has real and pervasive problems and that we may not be able to solve them. It is frightening when the people that surround us are not as good as we hoped they would be.

To be sure, it is unpleasant to talk of such things, so most of us are experts at pretending that things are just fine, masking the reality of our problems, and hoping that no one discovers that we are broken.

Many times when we engage in this masking of the real problems, we don’t even mean any harm.

I think about a married couple who has been together for several years. The last two have been horrible and they are ready to file for divorce. Perhaps it wasn’t anyone’s fault—a job that was lost created financial problems and personal insecurities that they never figured out how to talk about. A travel schedule took away most of their time together and they just started to grow apart. Perhaps they couldn’t have children, and never figured out how to share the grief and disappointment they felt. Now it’s been going on like that for two years, and only now, on the verge of divorce, they confess, “We thought about seeing a marriage counselor, but we didn’t, because to do that seemed like admitting failure.”

When I think about our tendency to avoid talking about the bad things, I think also about things like September 11, 2001. Over ten years ago now, rescue workers put heroic efforts into rapidly cleaning up the toppled Twin Towers, and restoring the Pentagon to its exact pre-disaster appearance as if nothing happened at all. But the questions remain: Did the cleanup solve the problem? Has it made us safe again? Has it taken us back to the invincible feeling we had before? If so, then why am I reminded on every trip to the airport that we are still under “orange alert”? Do we ever wonder if in our resolve to return to normal we’ve missed our chance to fix things?

As Dante wrote, “If I would show the good that came of it, I must talk about things other than the good.”

Dante, the married couple, our country facing disaster—none of us are the first to struggle with this matter.

I think about Joseph and Pharaoh in the story Joyce read today. Many of us understand it as a story with good intentions. Pharaoh has a dream: seven fat and sleek cows come up out of the Nile, followed by seven sickly cows that devour them. Seven healthy ears of grain spring up out of the earth, followed by seven weak and dry ears that rise up like weeds and consume the healthy grain. As the story goes, Joseph interprets the dream for Pharaoh: Famine, he says, is on the way. Egypt will see seven good years, but seven bad years are coming. It is time to prepare ourselves. We must store up the extra food of the next seven years so that we will have enough for the lean times to come. And this advice seems wise to Pharaoh and all his servants, so they begin work on their plan, storing up all the grain they can get their hands on. And when the lean years come and the people come begging for food, Pharaoh feeds them, first in exchange for their money, then for their cattle, then their land, and finally in exchange for their freedom. As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann points out, there is deep irony in a part of this story that never gets addressed. Why is it that Pharaoh, the richest man in Egypt, is having dreams about losing it all? See, he never asks that question, the question at the base of all his anxiety and all his striving. As the Gospel of Matthew states it, he stores up treasures on earth, but ignores the poverty of his heart (Matthew 6:19–21).

The nearly divorced couple that never sought help, the terrorism survivors who want to go back to “normal,” the wealthy Pharaoh and his anxious dream that enslaves a people—they give me pause, because there is nothing evil in their intentions. I believe they really do want to get it right. They really do want to be on the right path in this journey through life, but when they began to wander from the path, they find it hard to talk about it. So they struggle alone; they try to force their way back to the right path. But they have never dealt with how they left the straight path. And now they are truly lost.

And in all of their wanderings, I hear Dante’s words, written so many years ago:

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off the straight path.

. . . A bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it,
I must talk about things other than the good.
(Dante, Inferno, I. 1–9).

Ash Wednesday is a day for talking about things other than the good. We consider ways we have wandered off the path. We talk about our fallibility, and we contemplate our mortality. Ashes are placed on our foreheads as we hear the words “Remember you are from dust, and to dust you shall return.”

It takes no particular wisdom or insight to point out that things are not the way they are supposed to be or that every one of us gathered in this room has wandered off the path at times. The problem is what to do with that observation. All of this begs the question: if Dante is right and we must talk of things other than the good, what is the good that comes of it?

Of course, most of us have good intentions to get back on the right path. We don’t enjoy the feeling of having wandered off, having betrayed our best selves, and so we do the responsible thing: we try to fix it. It just makes sense to us that if we wander off, we should have to find our own way back. That’s what life teaches us: Break the law, pay a fine; cheat on your test and fail the class; mess up at work, lose your job. And so, of course, we come to church expecting the same treatment from God: if we have fallen short of God’s hopes for us, of course, we deserve to be punished; if we have wandered from God’s path, of course we must find our own way back. That can only be what is expected, what is right, what is just.

But that is not the story of Christ. In this season of Lent that is before us, we remember not only that we are lost and wandering, but that Christ is the one who is able to find the path. And when we wander off, Christ comes to find us. Where is the good that comes of talking about things other than the good? Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, is going to wander off the path for the sake of finding you. You may be in the dark wood, but you are not in the dark wood all on your own; you are not all alone to find your way back.

It is a scandalous idea; it rubs against all our inclinations about what is just and what is fair. Pastor Craig Barnes writes that so often when someone speaks to us of the grace of God, we just glaze over with confusion. “I don’t have to find my own way back? Well, that doesn’t seem right,” we say (Craig Barnes, Searching for Home, pp. 175–176). It doesn’t make sense to us. Which is why another pastor, Shawnthea Monroe-Mueller, points out that perhaps the only thing on Ash Wednesday as difficult as acknowledging what has separated us from God is the ability to embrace God’s forgiveness (Shawnthea Monroe-Mueller, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Ash Wednesday).

But there is help along the way. We will send you from this place today with a sign of the cross upon you in ashes, a reminder of your frailty, a reminder of your need for God. But because it is difficult for us to accept the forgiveness and restoration that God wants for us so badly, we will also share God’s gifts at the Communion table.

Most of us have at least some rudimentary understanding that when we take Communion, something special has happened to that bread and cup, that they have changed and become something else, the body and blood of Christ. The father of our faith, John Calvin, actually had a different way of explaining it. Jesus didn’t eat his meals at an altar, Calvin observed, but at a table with friends. And so we do not observe a miracle at an altar; we are invited to come to a table. And here the bread is broken and the cup is blessed, and what gets changed is not the elements; what gets changed is the people who eat them. If you have trouble understanding that God’s forgiveness can change your life, this table is the place to start understanding.

Here, we who are so stubbornly tied to the idea that when off the path we must find our own way back, here we are given an early sign that Christ is coming to find us. It is not a sign that nothing is wrong. It is not a sign that we are not lost. It is not a sign that if you only try harder, you can be just as good as Jesus. What it is is a good reminder. We who treasure so deeply our own sense of justice, we who fiercely hang on to our guilt, we who resist God’s forgiveness in our endless striving to make things right on our own—if only we can dwell long enough with our brokenness, if only we can speak honestly of all the ways in which we have failed—then we may be able to see the God who wants to help us.

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off the straight path.

. . . A bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it,
I must talk about things other than the good.

Amen.