Ash Wednesday 2010

Canon Mark Oakley

Towards the end of 1999 I decided I wanted to go on a strange pilgrimage to mark the end of the millennium and so I took myself off, alone, to Warsaw, Poland, and then to Krakow, and from there on a rattling old bus with only three passengers to Auschwitz. Poland was deep in snow and on the night before I travelled to Auschwitz I had been attacked in Krakow by two muggers so I was a bit sore and shaken up, and if I’m honest, a bit sorry for myself.

I’m sure you’ll remember that time back home – lots of hype about the new millennium and how it was going to be symbolized in a fantastic new construction called the Dome. Now, to me, St Paul’s is a dome, St Peter’s in Rome is a dome. This new building seemed more like a Big Top to me. But of course we were also ending a century that had seen the most appalling amount of war, death and cruelty and to top it all, if you’ll remember, at the end of the 90’s the historian David Irving was denying some of the worst of those atrocities. It seemed important to me to try and learn more, to enter the heart of darkness as it were, and to go on this journey and to treat it like a pilgrimage and so I found myself on that freezing old bus.

I remember so many things about my visit. There were only three of us there and it was snowing heavily. The three of us did not speak to one another. It seemed inappropriate. I remember the suitcases all piled high that had been packed with fear and confusion but taken away on arrival, the artificial limbs, hair and toys all stacked up to the ceiling. But what I remember most is the underground chamber where men, women and children were taken to their death, and then, moving next door, seeing the crematoria. That room was the room of ash. The ash summarized so much – not only our fragility, our mortality, our transience, but also, the cruelty, evil power and murder that we are capable of in the name of our ideologies, politics and beliefs. In those ovens nearly a million Jews, as well as communists, the disabled, Nazi resisters, Christians, gay people, Poles, Soviets, Roma and many others had their lives ended and turned to ash.

I also remember visiting the cell in which Fr Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest, had been kept. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's barracks vanished, prompting the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts (the man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine). One of the selected men, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe remained and he was killed with an injection of carbolic acid. Some who were present at the injection say that he raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection.

Why do I think about these things today? Well, the obvious prompt was that ash, like the ash that will be placed on us in a moment. A reminder to us of our mortality and our dependence upon God, the hope in the ruins.  But also as a reminder of spiritual life. I guess that most of us feel that our life is not spiritual enough because of its complexities and concerns. Spirituality, we have come to believe, is the province of those who manage to escape from the pressures of life. The truly spiritual person, tradition teaches us, though, knows that spirituality is concerned with how to live a full life, not an empty one. The fact is, all we have in life is life. That is why when it is taken away it is a terrible act. Things—the cars, the houses, the educations, the jobs, the money—come and go. They turn to dust between our fingers eventually, they change and disappear. No, things do not make life. The gift of life, the secret of it, is that life must be developed from the inside out, from what we bring to it from within ourselves, not from what we collect or consume as we go through it, not even from what we experience in the course of it.

It is not circumstances that make or destroy a life. Anyone who has survived the death of a lover, the loss of a position, the end of a dream, the enmity of a friend knows that. Even in the torture of a camp that I cannot begin to imagine or comment on with any integrity, maybe even it was possible to befriend life? It is the way we live each of the circumstances of life, the humdrum as well as the extraordinary, the daily as well as the defining moments, that determines the quality of our lives. Yet, each of us has the latitude to live life either well or poorly. Ironically enough, it is a matter of decision. And the decision is ours.

Time presses upon us and tells us we’re too busy to be contemplative, reflective, but our souls know better.

Souls die from lack of reflection. Responsibilities dog us and tell us we’re too involved with the "real" world to be concerned about the spiritual questions. But it is always spiritual questions that make the difference in the way we go about our public responsibilities. Marriage, business, children, professions have all been defined in ways that make contemplation impossible, but no one needs contemplation more than the harried mother, the irritable father, the ambitious executive, the striving professional, the poor woman, the sick man. Then, in those situations, we need reflection, understanding, meaning, peace of soul more than ever.

Life is not an exercise to be endured. It is a mystery to be unfolded. Life comes from the living of it, from the attitudes we bring to it and the understandings we take away from each of the moments that touch our own. The truth is that life is the only commodity each of us actually owns. It is the only thing in the universe over which we have any real control whatsoever, slim as that may be.

It is a busy world. A frightfully busy world. It is the kind of world that consumes us, drains our souls, dries out our hearts, damps our spirits, and makes living more a series of duties than a kind of joyful mystery. We find ourselves spending life too tired to garden, too distracted to read, too busy to talk, too plagued by people and deadlines to organize our lives, to reflect on our futures, to appreciate our present. We simply go on, day after day after day. Where is what it means to be human in all of that? Where is God in all of that? How shall we ever get the most out of life if life itself is our greatest obstacle to it? In the Gospel Jesus gives us a starting point: give money charitably, don’t be hypocritical, pray, fast, and make sure you know what your real treasure is in life and concentrate on that. Make sure your heart knows where it is. All these things, of course, throw us back on ourselves so that we don’t keep seeing the faults in others or in our circumstances.

"Prayer," the old definition read, was "the raising of our hearts and minds to God." As if God were some regal, distant judge outside ourselves. But science, with its new perception that matter and spirit are of a piece, sometimes particles, sometimes energy, assures us that God is not out there on a cloud somewhere, imperious and suspecting. God is the very energy that animates us. God is the spirit that leads us and drives us on. God is the voice within us calling us to life. God is the reality trying to come to fullness within us, both individually and together. It is to that cosmic God, that personal, inner, enkindling God, that we pray this Lent that we will live our life well and to his glory.