The Place Where We Are Right: A Lenten Reflection

The Place Where We Are Right

By: Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood. [1]

For Christians around the world, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. It is a time of self-examination, repentance, fasting, and self denial that leads to the most solemn week of the Christian year: Holy Week.

It is customary for the ashes that are imposed on the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday to be taken from the previous year's palm branches from Palm Sunday. The palm branches are a symbol of triumph, but they are also marred with the reality that the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem ended with his horrific torture, persecution, and death. The people who waved the palm branches high in the air, shouting "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!" at the beginning of the week are the same people who, just a few days later will seal Jesus' fate by shouting, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" There is never a second of doubt or uncertainty in either instance. The crowds make their thoughts known with blinding certainty.

The ashes that are smeared across our foreheads are physical markers of our own frailty, our capriciousness, and our fickleness of heart that drive us to be "right" and "absolute" in all that we do.

But if we will allow it, the ashes can do more than just remind us of what we already know, but desperately try to ignore.

Perhaps these ashes can mark for us a holy Lent if we allow them to sear into our hearts, freeing us from our desperate desire for "rightness" and "certainty" and emblazoning us instead with the desire to risk and to love.

It is in the risking of love that we are met with uncertainty. Loss, hope, pain, bliss... And it is in the risking of love that we make way for the possibility of encountering Christ anew, as the faint whispers of "Alleluia! Alleluia!" grow louder in the distance!

[1] The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Trans. by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell, (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 34.

I am grateful to The Very Reverend Dr. Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, for introducing me to Yehuda Amichai some years ago and for bringing Lent to life for us in a new and transformative way.