Readings: Joel 2:12-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
On this Ash Wednesday,
and throughout the Lenten season,
the Lord invites us to become
a broken-hearted people.
“Rend your hearts and not your garments….
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep,
and say, ‘Spare, O Lord, your people’…”
The Lord invites us to become a people
whose hearts are not merely broken,
but broken open—
broken open to God,
broken open to our true selves,
and broken open to our neighbors.
This is the purpose
of the traditional disciplines of Lent:
the disciplines of prayer,
of fasting,
and of almsgiving
about which Jesus speaks in our Gospel.
These are practices through which God’s grace works
to break open hearts that have closed in on themselves.
In prayer, our hearts are broken open to God.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux wrote that prayer
is “a cry of recognition and love…
which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus.”
When I pray, I invite Christ into my heart
and find my heart being stretched
so as to contain the infinite love of God.
For a heart hardened by sin or indifference
this expansion of the soul
involves a certain sort of breaking,
as I struggle with the tedium and distraction
that seem so often to accompany my prayer.
This is all part of the breaking open
and breaking through
that we must endure
if we are to receive God’s love.
During the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the hard discipline of prayer
so as know the love of God.
In fasting, our hearts are broken open
to our true selves.
To fast is to sacrifice those material things
that we seek to substitute for the love of God,
and that we use to distract ourselves
from our own neediness and fragility.
To let myself feel hunger or longing or deprivation
it to let my heart be broken by the recognition
that I am dust and to dust I shall return.
To surrender my illusion of self-sufficiency
is also to have my heart broken open
to the possibility of hope, not in myself,
but in Jesus Christ crucified and risen,
who breathes his Spirit
into this creature of dust.
As the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote:
“Jesus Christ is a God
whom we approach without pride,
and before whom we humble ourselves
without despair” (Pascal, Pensées n. 245).
In the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the joyful discipline of fasting
so as to know our true selves
and our need of God.
In giving alms and in other acts of charity,
our hearts are broken open to our neighbors.
Hearts broken open to God in prayer
and to our own needy selves in fasting
can be hearts truly open
to the needs of others.
Knowing the love that is God
and my own self as dust
brought to life by God’s breath,
the need of my neighbor breaks my heart,
for I see that he or she
is no threat to my prosperity,
but rather one like me:
the underserving recipient
of God’s gift of life,
a fellow beggar
at the banquet of God’s love.
Released from the compulsion
to use our material goods
to shore up our self-worth,
we are freed to use those goods to alleviate
the heartbreaking suffering of our world.
In the Lenten season
we are called to embrace
the Godly discipline of almsgiving
so as to know our neighbor
as God’s beloved.
Rend you hearts and not your garments:
not for show,
nor merely out of duty,
but so that you may know the love of God.
Let us embark together on this holy season
of prayer and fasting and almsgiving,
so that we may discover
what it means to love as God loves,
with hearts broken joyfully open.
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Click here for video of this homily.
