All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. Isaiah 64:6

The book of Isaiah has some of scripture’s most visceral metaphors for the nature of goodness and sin. In this verse, the author compares human goodness to filthy rags, using the word for the rags that women used for menstrual blood.  It is a stark image, not likely to be repeated in church on Sunday morning.  A pastor would not last long with most congregations if he told them that their righteousness was like dirty tampons.

But if disgust has a place in spirituality, then disgusting metaphors have a place in scripture.  In fact, I once learned a lot from a disgusting metaphor.

Almost twenty years ago, I had a disturbing dream. I never told anyone about it, for reasons you will obviously deduce in a minute. In an impulsive moment, however, I shared it with my Bible study group at church last week, and they seemed to consider it sufficiently useful to be worth its grossness, so I decided to share it with you.

In my dream, I was sitting in a bathroom stall in my dormitory, and I was covered in sh*t.  I know some of you are offended by that word, but that’s what it was, and it was supposed to be offensive.  That was the point of the dream.

I was sitting in the bathroom stall, covered in sh*t, on me and on the walls and everywhere.  It was horrifying.  But instead of getting clean, I was taking expensive parchment paper and wrapping up the foulness in little packages and stacking it behind me.  I had a stack going halfway up the wall.

I was wrapping yet another, when the stall door opened and someone looked in on me.  She took a minute to comprehend what she was seeing, then asked, obviously stunned, “Veronica, what are you doing?”

“I’m saving it for later,” I said.

And then I woke up.

I spent the day mulling over my shocking dream.  In a moment of sudden clarity I realized: that was my sin.  Given the opportunity to be washed and clean through Jesus, instead I am sitting in my filth, treating the mess like it is something precious.

All these years later, I am sometimes faced with something I need to confess, or some wretched pride or resentment that I am still clinging to when I shouldn’t, and I will feel that familiar wave of embarrassment and realize: I’m doing it again.  I’m saving it for later.

“Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Matthew 8:2

“Don’t scold me any more,” said Lady Slane, looking up and smiling; “I assure you that if I did wrong , I paid for it. But you mustn’t blame my husband.”

“I don’t. According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told.”

In Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, the Lady Slane is a new widow who retires to the country to spend her days in introspection. She looks back on a long marriage to the man she loved, a diplomat and former viceroy to India, and she begins to rediscover regrets that she has never admitted to anyone.

Gradually, through long interior monologues, we learn that Lady Slane wanted to be an artist, but gave up her dreams and a large part of herself to become the wife and mother that her husband wanted. Now, at eighty-five, she is widowed and able to find the lost part of herself again.

Sackville-West portrays marriage and motherhood as a kind of death. Not a physical death, but the death of a person’s dreams and ambitions and most private self. The demands and expectations of motherhood crowd out everything else, and a woman sacrifices herself for the benefit or convenience of those around her.

Christian authors have been saying the same thing for centuries, but with exactly the opposite interpretation. One of the most outspoken advocates for motherhood as a kind of sacrificial death is Elisabeth Elliot, who sees the many daily losses of self in motherhood as a way of imitating Christ. The demands of children are a thousand small crosses we carry, which serve to refine our character and make us holy.

Elliot and Sackville-West differ over the nature of the self. Sackville-West viewed our true selves as something inside us that we must recognize and release, and fiercely defend against all threats. Elliot sees our selves as wild, unruly things in need of pruning, even, in the mystery of Christian faith, need of death and resurrection. The many ways that a mother denies herself and her own desires and the frustrations and dissatisfactions of motherhood remind us to recognize our dependency on and find our fulfillment in God.

At first glance, Sackville-West and Elliot could not be more different. Elisabeth Eliot certainly has a low opinion of women like Sackville-West. But underneath the differences they share a dedication to the notion of vocation, the calling each of us feels for our special purpose in life and work. Elliot believes that a woman’s calling is always to be a housewife (something that puzzles me, given the decades she herself has spent as a professional writer and public speaker), while Sackville-West believed that our callings are more varied, but both believe in an unswerving obedience to that vocation, whatever it may be.

A few months ago I read this article at Leadership Journal, where the two ideas are found together. The author discusses the liberty that some people receive with widowhood. He tells this story:

I once stood near enough to overhear a conversation between a woman and two of her adult children soon after the funeral and burial services for her husband (and their father) had concluded. Apparently, either the son or the daughter, thinking they were offering a kind of protective love to the mother, tried to take charge and tell her something that she should or shouldn’t do.

The mother (freshly a widow, remember!) reacted with words wrapped in anger. “Now let’s get something straight right this minute. No one! No one is going to tell me what to do any longer. I’ve been doing what everyone else wanted (alluding no doubt to her deceased husband) for fifty years. Now it’s my turn. I’ll make my own decisions from here on out. Is this understood?”

He quietly laments the way some marriages require one person to hide their true self. After considering his own marriage, he asks himself the difficult question:

[I]s this woman whom I dearly love everything she is capable of being partly through my encouragement and affirmation? Or—and this is hard to write—would my departure be that “person’s” liberation?

I don’t worry much that Az the Husband squelches my personality. I’m hard to squelch, and early in our marriage I decided that whatever arguments it might cause I had to be forthright about who I really am. I am in this marriage for the long haul.

This morning I read the ninth chapter of the gospel of John, sitting cross-legged on my bed, waiting for my children to wake up so we could all get ready for church. I would like to tell you that I do this every morning, full of disciplined piety, but I don’t. My Bible reading, even after two master’s degrees in the subject, is haphazard and fly-by-night.

But today I was sitting cross-legged on my bed reading John 9 and thinking of my husband. John 9 always makes me think of my husband. My undergraduate advisor always told us that we could not understand the Bible until we take time to know the characters, and the summer before I met my husband, I had read through the gospel of John, trying to understand this character Jesus. Along the way I met the man born blind in chapter 9, that irascible old coot, and when I met Az the Husband I recognized him instantly as a sighted version of the same.

The story in John 9 is not so much about Jesus’ healing the blind man as the aftermath of that healing. In John’s Gospel, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day are out to get him from the beginning, and the nameless blind man becomes a pawn in the argument. They question him, trying to get him to either deny that Jesus healed him or deny that there is any significance to the healing.

And through all the theological and political wrangling, the former blind man refuses to participate. He is stodgy and crabby and clearly thinks the whole argument is stupid. Instead of joining in the debate, he stubbornly sticks to what he knows: “One thing I know: I was blind, but now I see.”

When his questioners exhaust his patience completely, he throws out a final retort dripping with sarcasm: “Why, this is an amazing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

When I first got to know Az the Husband, he reminded me of two characters from literature. The first was this blind man, lovably cantankerous, rock-solid certain of what he knows and scornful of rationalizations that seek to overcome uncomfortable evidence.

The second was Giles Corey from The Crucible, a man accused of witchcraft in the Salem trials. Crafty old Giles knew that the court would convict him regardless of evidence, so he refused to enter a plea, thereby preventing the trial from taking place. In order to force him to enter a plea, the court had him slowly crushed with rocks, adding more to the pile and asking for his plea.

His dying words were “More weight.”

I love this irascible man I married, in part because I want to be like him. The temptation of fundamentalism - whether the organized kind or a strictly idiosyncratic bigotry - is to quash the evidence we don’t like, to sift the world so that only those things that confirm our opinions are allowed to matter. There is a dark selfishness inside many of us, regardless of the religion we belong to, that whispers to us that we already know the answers before we ask the questions, and who is this or that person or thing to contradict us anyway?

And when I hear that whisper, I remember the Giles Corey sitting across the dinner table from me, and I thank God for certain kinds of blindness, and pray for a certain kind of sight.

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,
Meek maidens, from the voices crying ’shame.’
I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.
Let no one dream but that he loves me still.
So let me, if you do not shudder at me,
Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;
Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,
Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;
Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,
But not rejoicing;

- From Tennyson’s “Guinevere”

In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Guinevere functions as his everyman, the representative of ordinary humanity. Her betrayal of Arthur and her reconciliation with him speaks not only of the nature of adultery, but of sin and the universal human condition.

After her affair with Lancelot is discovered and she has fled Camelot, Arthur finds her in the convent where she is hiding. For the first time she faces the significance of her actions, and Guinevere recognizes that her sin - and symbolically, all sin - is ultimately a failure of hope, a rejection of the greater things God has for us. God places joy in our hands, and sin consists of carelessly letting it drop, reaching for something else. In her famous words:

Ah my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
Had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known:
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We do not look up high enough; we do not aspire. I have always found uncomfortably true the confession from the late musician Rich Mullins: “I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want/ than take what you give that I need.”

Repentance and forgiveness offer to us a restoration of vision and hope (though rarely a return of passed-by opportunities).

The quote with which I began this post is Guinevere’s closing penitential speech to the nuns with whom she will live. Despite the insight Tennyson offers in the rest of his poem, here I think he missed the mark. Tennyson tries to show us the sincerity of Guinevere’s repentance by promising that she will never participate in joy again. While she hopes in heaven, she still will never let herself feel anything but penitence.

Today is the second Sunday in Lent. Lent is a period of traditional fasting and self-denial in preparation for the events of Holy Week, when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent is the forty days before Easter - except it isn’t. The season of Lent is forty days plus six Sundays.

Sunday, in Christian liturgical tradition, is always a feast day. Christians took the seven day week from ancient Hebrew tradition and worship, and transformed the Sabbath into Sunday in honor of the day on which Jesus rose from the dead. Every Sunday, even during Lent, we rejoice and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Even in the midst of fasting, we remember the resurrection and we feast.

This is where the Guinevere poem is so dissatisfying. Guinevere does not need to abstain from all joy forever. Our goal, even in Lent when we formally meditate upon our sins, is not to be in constant self-recrimination. Every Sunday the resurrection breaks through and lets us know that God is bigger than sin, even bigger than death. Every Sunday we receive the fresh assurance of the possibility of new life, freeing us from the old. Every Sunday, God’s forgiveness shakes the ground and rolls the stone away again.

Refusing to ever feel joy is a kind of denial of this constant and resurging grace. It is ultimately the opposite of humility. Humbly receiving the joy and love God offers, rather than insisting it could not really be for screw-ups like us, is the mark of real repentance. To do otherwise is to once again let the joy slip from our hands.

“For His anger is but for a moment; His favour is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5

*******************
I meant to write this post last week for the first Sunday in Lent, but I was too worn out. I will try to write a post each Sunday until Easter on the themes of fasting and feasting, but sometime during Lent I may have a baby, which will surely mean a blog hiatus (or maybe I should say a blog fast).

John Donne’s Hymn to God the Father

Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done.
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore:
And, having done that, Thou hast done:
I fear no more.

Donne’s poem impacted me profoundly when I first read it. I discovered Donne through a slim, beat-up paperback in my parents’ basement, leftover from my Dad’s college days. It was just a collection of his Holy Sonnets, but it spoke to me in a way no other writer ever had.

My first year of graduate school, I used to visit a corner of my favorite bookstore where there was a hardbound copy of his complete poetry. The book was twenty-one dollars, an enormous sum for me back then. After months of returning to that corner to read the book, I finally bought it (I decided I could skimp on groceries for a few weeks).

In “Hymn to God the Father,” Donne writes of the sin that pollutes us and keeps us from God, but he ends recognizing a final sin: the fear that God will not forgive, that Donne’s sin will alienate him forever from God.

I have little respect for people who cannot recognize their own moral failings. In my mind, humbly acknowledging our own errors and flaws is the bedrock of good character. This characteristic, however, can become a twisted form of pride: I am better than everyone else because I think I am worse than everyone else. Unlike they, I face the truth about myself. I know what an awful person I am. This is part of the devastating logic of depression, the belief that I have some secret insight into the depth of my own failures that other people fail to notice.

The Christian gospel teaches us something different. We are not the arbiters of our own goodness or evil; God is. We can declare ourselves neither unforgivable nor above forgiveness. When God forgives, we are forgiven, and fears and doubts about such things only attempt to knock God off the throne and put ourselves in his place. We cannot undo God’s forgiveness.

The challenge of faith in the Gospel is to each day recognize we are not the masters of our own souls, making ourselves good and bad, but that we are the receivers of God’s grace, a grace that loves sinners, that stoops to our weakness, that breathes new life into the dead. I cannot make myself holy; I can only accept that God has done it for me through Jesus Christ.

Ash Wednesday focuses on the two foundational truths of the Christian faith: the reality and catastrophe of our sin and the overwhelming power of God’s love and forgiveness. The wisdom and humility of Christian spirituality is in holding both truths equally in our hearts at the same time.

I cannot make myself forgivable; I can only accept the free and expansive gift of God’s forgiveness, based not on my actions or character, but on his. The joy of Christianity is in accepting that we are not in control, but we are deeply loved and eagerly forgiven by the one who is.

And having done that, I fear no more.

********************

I am planning a series of posts for each of the Sundays in Lent, primarily on the spirituality of fasting and feasting. Stop by on Sundays, if you are interested. It would be great to see you.