The gift of ashes
Some Lenten thoughts on what is passing, and what endures
It’s an odd feeling, having ashes1 scraped across one’s forehead. I can’t say exactly why, but there’s something refreshing about being anointed with a symbol of my inevitable demise. Perhaps it’s because I live in a culture that is alternately terrified of death and pretends death doesn’t exist. Yet once each year, I can walk into a church and be smeared with soot and told that I am going to die:
‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return’
This is one of the two possible exhortations the priest utters while anointing my forehead with ashes. Stark, simple, and true. I am mortal. I will die. This flesh will return to the earth and disintegrate. This truth is sobering, and liberating. On some level, there’s inherent freedom in living one’s life in accord with reality. Yet, this message is fully liberating only when heard alongside the other exhortation that goes with the Ash Wednesday anointing:
‘Repent, and believe in the Gospel’
I will die. Yet while I still live, I can turn my heart back to the Source of all life, and trust and open to the liberating reality of the One who rose from the dead. My life and His can be yoked together, so that my death is held in the embrace of His death and resurrection. One part of me has come from dust, and is on its way back to dust. Another part was made in the image and likeness of God, and is invited to dwell in eternal glory.
My mortality. Christ’s immortality. The call to yoke my mortal life to Christ’s divine life. The Gospel in summary.
It has been almost a year since I wrote a post here on Substack. I got out of my writing routine last March, and swept into the busyness of the homestead and the rhythms of the land in the spring. Last summer we were blessed to have three young adults (ages 18-22) join us for the summer, and we shifted from being a family that received many guests to a little Christian community. We added more structure and depth to our prayer practices, and cobbled together a functioning study program for the summer. We learned how to work well together on the land. We doubled or tripled most aspects of our food production, both agricultural and through wild harvesting. With a bit of coaching, the three young adults took to wild mushroom harvesting during a wet and fecund year.
It was a joyful, abundant season of life for our land, our family, and our community. Now, the young adults have moved on, and we’re back to being a family of four on the land. The fields and forests are again covered in a thick blanket of snow. Next week, the forecast of for a series of days well above freezing and nights well below. The sap will begin to rise, we’ll make some maple syrup, and a new season of life will begin at Metanoia. Only this year, things will be different.
Lisa and I are spending 2024 in sabbatical, something we committed to when we began Metanoia of Vermont in 2017. We’ve seen countless ministries and projects begin with divine inspiration and noble goals, but over time become more and more caught up in passing concerns. Without anybody ever quite realizing it, a project like ours can easily end up moving from urgent activity to urgent activity, and after a decade or so the organization is serving concerns on an entirely ‘horizontal’ or this-worldly plane. So, we’ve committed to keeping sabbath every seventh year. It’s a time to discern what in our work ready to die and be let go. It’s a time to un-know, to release, and to let things be. We’re planting only cover crops and not raising meat animals this, hoping to allow the land itself to share in our rest. As we pray, we hope to return to a receptive, faithful listening to God for guidance for the next seven years. Our hope and prayer is that our actions stem from divine inspiration in every season, rather than simply carrying forward the inspiration of years passed. We’re seeking to drink anew from the springs of divine life day by day, rather than simply carrying bottled water from a past visit to the wellspring.
On the one hand, I’d like to apologize to my readers for so long a delay in writing. On the other hand, I’m am grateful that I’ve been living from my priorities - emphasizing the physical over the digital, and face-to-face relationships over virtual ones. I do still believe in the value of a publication like this, but I’m becoming increasingly clear that the true value of online content is only to serve and support the flourishing of off-line life and relationships. If this writing inspires, encourages, or supports you in your relationships with other people, with Creation, and/or with God, then it has fulfilled its purpose. To stay faithful to my avocation as a writer, I need to keep this end in mind. To stay faithful to our way of life, I need to ensure that my writing flows from our life of prayer and intimacy with God and Creation, and never becomes an impediment, a distraction, or a substitute for that life. These words, if unsupported by a life of wholeness, are but ashes. Even when they emerge from life in God, they remain ashes. But if they come from Love and point back to Love, the ashes will have served their purpose as signposts to the life that endures beyond death.
Speaking of ashes, the unraveling of the world has only accelerated in the year since I wrote my last post. I’m regularly struck by the oddness of our life situation here at Metanoia. On our homestead, we’re in a season of tremendous growth. Our family is growing, our community is growing, our infrastructure is expanding, and our fields are becoming more fertile with every passing year. Our relationships, wild, human, and heavenly continue to deepen. There’s a palpable sense of hope, renewal, and new life. At the same time, the state of the world beyond our property line appears increasingly dark and chaotic. I see this in both the media headlines and in the lives of our acquaintances and wider local community. Our work appears to be the task of living into something good, true, and beautiful in an age of upheaval, dislocation and loss. A few themes come to mind as I reflect on this paradox:
We - the United States, and the West more broadly, and the global ‘everywhere’ culture it has birthed, are in a time of decline. At the root of this decline is a culture-wide forgetting of what is spiritual to focus intensely on the material. This movement is at least 500 years old, though it appears to be nearing a climax of sorts. There have been many countervailing forces and efforts over the generations, but this is the dominant direction of Western culture for the past five centuries. It is inherently unsustainable, as a sustainable foundation cannot be built on what is passing. Matter is ever changing, and a culture steeped in materialism will never be stable or at rest. There’s little any of us can do to stop the unraveling of the West at this point. It’s not a recent failure. It is not any person’s, class of people’s, or even generation’s fault. It’s the ripening of a centuries-long experiment of what happens when a culture ignores metaphysical reality.
A sustainable human culture must be built on the centrality of the relationship between humans and God2. What is changing then finds its stability in the One who does not change3. This does not eliminate the upheavals of life, but it roots them in relationship with a stable Reality, and thus relativizes our attachment to things subject to change. This then allows us to live in peace in the finite realm, because part of our being is wed to and participating in that which is infinite.
The work of yoking our individual and collective lives to God through relationship with Christ is the essence of Christianity. This is the basis for understanding salvation as a process of theosis or ‘divinization’, a central theme in Christianity for its first 1500 years.
Every person faces this same dynamic in their individual lives, as does every family and small community. To the extent that a person (or family, or small community) is rooted in intimate relationship with God, there is peace. To the extent that we become attached to externals, whether material things, experiences, self-image or relationships, we are filled with anxiety. As with our culture, we cannot find rest as individuals except in God.
The chaos of society cannot impede resting in God for the pure in heart. When our heart is aligned with God, we have peace even in the midst of severe hardship and disruption in the world. There were saints in Auschwitz. All hardship becomes an opportunity for purification when received with faith. As Jesus says4, we have nothing to fear from those who can only harm our bodies, if our souls are in right relationship with God.
An ‘inside-out’ orientation has become a lifeline for our community. Our primary commitments are to love God and open to God’s love within. This is a mighty labor that requires time, discipline, and a willingness to suffer and let go. Our secondary commitments are to love those we are in immediate relationship with (first family, then fellow residential community members, then neighbors), and to reform our way of life. Our tertiary commitments involve our relationships with the public and loving service to the wider world. Unless our house is in order, we have little to give to others that will endure.
For those of us blessed with the freedom to chose how we will live, it is possible to build a joyful, vibrant, Christ-centered sub-culture. All we needed at our homestead this past summer was seven people in residence (with a handful of others coming and going) to create a world of great abundance where people, God and Creation were in some semblance of right relationship. It’s not easy, but it’s also not that difficult to do when those involved are clear about their intentions and are willing to surrender their egos in service of Christ. The demons that dance in our heads want us to think this is a very difficult, complex endeavor. It isn’t.
We do not need to wait for the culture to become whole to ourselves become whole in God, either as individuals or as families and small communities. Indeed, if we wait for the culture to become whole, or try to fix the culture instead or purifying our own hearts, we will never get there. The Gospel wisdom remains - to ‘save the world’ we must leave it and release all identification with saving it. Yet, when we increasingly belong to God, we will be used by God to serve and suffer and love.
Prayer is effective in the healing of the world far beyond its ability to inspire and motivate direct action. A hidden life of prayer can be a life of profound service to humanity, as our well-being is deeply interconnected in the spiritual realm. To pray with love and trust in God is to attack the sickness of our culture at its root. Our prayer is a gift not merely to ourselves, but to all of humanity. Self-emptied prayer is it the only way of service where we can be certain of the enduring fruit of our efforts, even though they remain more hidden than outward acts.
The healing of Creation (aka ‘nature’) is inseparable from the healing of our relationship with God. Because Creation is not a collection of dead matter but a community of living beings, we cannot possibly ‘save’ the environment by application of technique and technology. Growth in ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the other-than-human beings can become a natural and immensely fruitful outflow from life in God, and the lives of countless saints attest. Whether or not we feel ‘at home’ on this early is intimately connected with our ability to live in ‘I-Thou’ or de-objectified relationship with other creatures. When we live in loving relationship with God’s other creatures, sustainability and ecological health naturally follows. It’s possible to live in such a way that the land you and your community lives on is more fertile and productive because of your existence.
When we meet our spiritual needs spiritually (rather than seeking them in material substitutes), our material needs relativize and it becomes possible to live lightly on the land, and to be a blessing for other people, other species, and the land itself.
My hope and intention is to use this sabbatical to return to more regular posting. I’m grateful for your support, and for your patience with my (and our) process!
Or more accurately, powdered charcoal
Or at least, the transcendent spiritual realm. Non-theistic Buddhism would be an example of a culture rooted in transcendent spirituality by not in a sense of a personal God.
James 1:17, among many other passages
Matthew 10:28/ Luke 12:4-5
Great post 🥹🥹