What Do We Love? What Will it Cost?

Dust, Defeat and Transformation

At this point in life, what is there to lose? It’s all gain. And so I ask again:
What do we love? What will it cost? How much am I prepared to pay?
Martin Shaw, from the podcast Jawbone, Feb 2025

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.
Words from Ash Wednesday Liturgy

Turning to Christ allows us to be re-created from the dust of our humility: to be informed, reformed, transformed by the breath of the Spirit.
JLD

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Psalm 51

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

It may be just my imagination - yet it seems that we are just a bit more open this year to the challenge of these words. Might we even welcome them, albeit reluctantly, perhaps like a sick person might medicine? Hear me out!

We prefer, most of the time, the language of tenderness and unconditional love. We may have spent our life trying to escape the stuff of rigid and guilt-inducing religion which many of us have inherited. Most of us would squirm inside ourselves, if asked to say, at our traditional Evensong or anywhere else, that we are ‘miserable offenders’. But like it or not, Ash Wednesday is a call to repentance. And I find myself welcoming it.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

More and more I sense that my own true freedom - and that of the world’s - lies somewhere on the other side of what those words hold. The dust and ashes of great fires, of droughts and bombs, are almost flying in our faces at the moment. That dust is very hard to ignore. Will it blind us or awaken us? The Lenten challenge is to use this awareness to ‘ turn away from sin and to be faithful to Christ’.

The summons of this season is, ultimately to return to Love, to turn again to what will bring us most truly and profoundly alive. But Lent demands that we do the work. Cheap grace will not get us through! We need, instead, bracing words, sober realisations, energising challenge.

Francis Spufford famously wrote, Sin is the human propensity to f*ck things up. We certainly seem to be doing a lot of that. Of course, humanity has always done so, but has sometimes been able to deny it. Now the dust of death is so thick that we are choking on it. We can no longer ignore it.

To remember that we are dust, that our days are limited, could focus the mind and heart; could allow us to face the bad news of the world as a challenge to life rather than a death-knell. Great spiritual writers have advised a regular momento mori prayer. Remembering our death is good for us if so doing we consider how we really want to live.

Martin Shaw, story teller and writer said recently in a podcast -
At this point in life, what is there to lose? It’s all gain. And so I ask again: What do we love? What will it cost? How much am I prepared to pay?

What if to turn away from sin is to accept the cost of real love? To break it down to specific ways we are willing to ‘pay’ for it? To give ourselves the threefold challenge of this season?

By giving up the things that rob us of life, we can live more creatively for ourselves, and for our world; by giving to those around us the sort of practical attention that fosters love, we renew love in the world; and by giving in to the kind of prayer that allows us to receive from a power greater than ourselves, we can be restored to sanity.

What if to turn to Christ is to give in to a mystery, a resource, a way and a Spirit that will inspire and strengthen us for the journey ahead? I think we need to draw upon more than our personal resolve and action – though these are vital. To nourish hope, we need to surrender to a deeper source of life. The metaphor of dust has many dimensions and another might be to remind us of the ‘dust of creation’ that our Genesis story relates:

God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life, making him a living being… (Genesis 2.7)

Turning to Christ allows us to be re-created from the dust of our humility: to be informed, reformed, transformed by the breath of the Spirit.

My poem for this week alludes to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel – and his being left wounded but blessed. The final lines are:

Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Lent could be considered a necessary acceptance of defeat. We have come to the end of our ability to control and manage our world in the way we’ve always done. We can no longer solve the problem on the level on which it was created. We need, at last to relinquish our small power to find the greater, eternal power of love.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

A LITURGY OF PRAYER

Opening Prayer

Read Psalm 51 slowly as a prayer. Notice which lines draw you - either as invitation or challenge - and linger there.

1^st Readings

Psalm 51

Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;
according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!

For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight,
so that thou art justified in thy sentence
and blameless in thy judgment.
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Fill^[a] me with joy and gladness;
let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right^[b] spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Then I will teach transgressors thy ways,
and sinners will return to thee.
Deliver me from bloodguiltiness,^[c] O God,
thou God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of thy deliverance.

O Lord, open thou my lips,
and my mouth shall show forth thy praise.
or thou hast no delight in sacrifice;
were I to give a burnt offering, thou wouldst not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

Contemplative Practice

Silent is not always easy. The mind is hard to quiet. If you don’t yet have a way, you might find a single prayer word or phrase - and return to it each time you find your mind wandering. Your mind certainly will wander. Don’t worry. Just gently return, repeating the prayer word.

Find a quiet way to give up, give to and give in this Lent.

Widening the Circle

Give thanks for whatever grace you receive in your practice of silence or in your life generally. Take a moment to extend that grace to all those people and places on your heart today. And let’s dedicate our Lenten discipline, whatever that might be, to all those who are covered, even today, in the dust of death.

The Lord’s Prayer

There’s a nice version below.

2^nd Reading

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestler of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

By Rainer Maria Rilke
–Translated by Robert Bly

Blessing

And so may our small ways be defeated decisively by Greater Love. May we know what we love and pay the price for it. May we turn away from sin and be faithful to the mysterious and re-creative ways of Christ. May we find truth in our inward beings and wisdom in our secret hearts. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all, evermore. Amen.

Music:

This Kyrie Eleison (Lord Have Mercy), is all the more poignant for being sung by a Ukrainian choir. It’s haunting. It’s necessary.

Question for the Week: for Journal or Comment

What do you love? What will it cost? How much are you prepared to pay?

Be SPECIFIC. Make it a Lenten practice.

Dear Friends: If you’re looking for one way to find support during this time, you are welcome to join me and a small group that meets every Wednesday evenings: 7.15 - 8.00, UK time. The content and format are what I post here.

If you are interested, please send me a direct message saying a bit about yourself and I’ll send you the zoom link. You’d be most welcome for one or all of the Wednesdays in Lent.

The New Zealand Anglican Lord's Prayer

Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and for ever.
Amen.

Jim Cotter