Ash Wednesday Lenten Study

Where Do We Turn For Forgiveness?
(Week of Ash Wednesday)

Opening Reflection
From Psalm 50 in The Psalms, A New Translation
Arranged by Joseph Gelineau

Indeed you love truth in the heart;
then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom.

O purify me, then I shall be clean;
O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow.
O rescue me, God, my helper,and my tongue shall ring out your goodness.

O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall declare your praise.

Introduction To The Texts

No sin is private, hurting no one but ourselves. A secret good deed has public consequences. We are interdependent and social creatures. We are one body. We need one another. Lent provides a perennial occasion to acknowledge and attend to our interrelatedness, to our most intimate and our most universal communities of love and concern.

When Thomas Merton, after visiting his doctor, stepped out on the busy sidewalk at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, the illusion of separateness from everyone he saw faded to reveal that “there are no strangers.” He wrote of this epiphany in his journal: “There, there is God in my own Kind, my own Kind — ‘Kind’which means ‘likeness’ and which means ‘love’ and which means ‘child.’Mankind. Like one another, the dear ‘Kind’ of sinners united and embraced in only one heart, in only one Kindness, which is the Heart and Kindness of God” (A Search for Solitude, pp. 182-183).

Lent is a season for metanoia, a change of heart and mind from “former ways of life” that delude us into living as if we could be separate from one another. Lent reeducates us for living communally. Lent calls us to the truth of our unity as we celebrate our being one body in Christ.

From Seasons of Celebration

But where shall the sinner turn for pardon? To God, obviously. And the first thing is of course to seek Him in the depths of our heart, asking pardon for our sins. But the Christian conscience, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, tells us that this inner movement of repentance in the privacy of the heart, though it is essential, is not enough by itself. For sin is not a purely individual affair, and neither is pardon. However private it maybe, sin remains in some sense everybody’s business because everyone is affected by the evil that is in the heart of one. It is not possible for us to live so separate from others, so isolated and private in our own hearts, that our secret selfishness and sin will not affect others. We are involved in each other’s lives, not by choice but by necessity, for that is the way we are made. No one can pretend successfully to live purely in his or her own private universe and remain sane. The very condition of normal human life is community, communication, and “conversation” in the old Latin sense of conversatio — exchange on the level of social living.The lives of all of us are inextricably mixed together, and the salvation and damnation of souls is involved in this inescapable communication of freedoms. Either we will love and help one another or we will hate and attack one another, in which latter case we will all be one another’s hell. . .

The heart of the Christian message is precisely reconciliation in the Spirit of Love so that communion in freedom turns into communion in beatitude. In which case heaven is communion with “others”. (pp. 222-223).