Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
“…rend your hearts and not your clothing.”
“…whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to God who is in secret.”
This year, when I read these familiar injunctions from Joel and Matthew, I flashed back to a 5-day silent retreat that I attended some years ago. At the beginning of the retreat, the leader reminded us to maintain silence at all times and also to practice “custody of the eyes;” that is, not to make eye contact with other retreatants and to try as much as possible to maintain a downward and inward gaze for the next five days. He then said something that has stayed with me to this day. He said, “Think of this time as a vacation from having to be someone.” With this Lenten season in mind, let me repeat that: “Think of this time as a vacation from having to be someone.”
We don’t ordinarily think of Lent as a vacation. Traditionally, at least in my pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic upbringing, it was a season of unwelcome self-denial: giving up something that we enjoyed, like chocolate or ice cream, and having to go to church much more than we thought was optimal. It was more a season that we had to endure than one that we got to enjoy. But what is the essence of a vacation? Isn’t it the sense of freedom?…freedom from the obligations of our everyday life? I think my retreat leader was inviting us to enjoy a special kind of freedom: freedom from the burden of maintaining a self…freedom from the heavy burden of constructing a persona that we present to the world and to ourselves. I am thinking of Joel’s call today to “…rend your hearts and not your clothing…” I am thinking of this as a call to let go of our attachment to our perceived need to present ourselves to the world–to present ourselves in such a way that we will receive the praise or, in some cases, the blame that we expect–that we think we deserve. And I am thinking of Jesus’s call today to “…go into your room and shut the door and pray to God who is in secret…” I am thinking of this as a call to let go of our attachment to our own inner conceptions of who we are; a call to be wordlessly, nakedly, selflessly present to the God who is always and everywhere present to us and present in us. Is this the “easy yoke,” the “light burden” that Jesus speaks of later in Matthew’s gospel? I think it is.
The great 13th century Zen genius, Eihei Dogen, said all this very succinctly in an often-quoted passage. He wrote:
To study The Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.
It is in this freedom of forgetting ourselves, in this vacation from having to be someone, that we realize we are nothing more and nothing less than the dust wanders freely on the wind of the Spirit…the dust out of which we have been formed, and the dust to which we will return.