Ash Wednesday: Standing on Our Own Feet
This Ash Wednesday reflection invites listeners to consider how they make meaning in a world that no longer provides easy answers. Situating ourselves in the broader context of the “Great Awakenings” and periods of transition, we are challenged to cultivate our own spiritual grounding and practices. Step into Lent with intention, interrogating your life and reorienting towards what truly matters.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Just a few thoughts on Ash Wednesday, where we find ourselves on this particular day, stepping into this season of Lent.
I was speaking this afternoon with one of my students at Emory, and she works on a paper, and the topic of her paper is looking at the lives of this couple who did ministry work around the Washington, D.C., area in the late 1800s.
And we were looking and trying to put it into its larger context of the time in which they lived. How do we make sense of that? How they would focus and how they had such a passion to do the work that they were doing? What we learned, of course, we knew we had forgotten that they lived during the time that was known as the Third Great Awakening.
Now, this is a curious part of American religious history, that was the third. The first is linked with the time around the Revolutionary War, the sense of religious identity, this depth, this focus of spiritual life that rose into being at that time as the fledgling nation tried to make sense of who it was. People were drawn to make sense of that through a spiritual lens.
And so you have all of these writers, so many hymns, you know, were written during that time. That was the first one. The second one picked up around the year 1830, went to like the 1860s. And then everything kind of paused, of course, for the Civil War. The third one picked up in this time period, which is about the 1880s after the war, when the nation was once more trying to figure out who it was through all of the lenses that it could see itself through, one of the largest, of course, being how do we make spiritual sense of where we find ourselves?
And so you have this other groundswell moment of all of these poets and writers and all of these things. And that third one, some of you may know this name. That’s where the period of Dwight L. Moody comes in. So Dwight L. Moody was part of this third wave. The fourth wave is actually thought to be around the years from the 1960s to the 1980s, which, if you think about it, makes sense post-World War II, how the nation makes sense of who it is and this particular time span with the people who come back from the war, starting families, settling in.
Who am I? How do I make meaning in my life? So we were looking at that, just putting it into context and thinking, how do we make sense of where we are now being? If you will, each of those moments, each of those four, you can plot them out. And there was a momentum in energy that took place in all four of those Great Awakening moments.
What happened during each of them is that the momentum itself did a whole lot of the work. For the people who lived during that time span, you didn’t have to exert a lot of muscles to go with the flow because the flow was so pronounced, it carried you along with it. But what happened in the moments between those, in the troughs, if you will, is fascinating to look at because if you plot them out, you see in each one of those moments, there’s an existential crisis in people’s struggle.
People struggle to make meaning. They struggle to find ways to ground themselves. They struggle to make sense. They grasp for a lens to see their lives through. And what’s curious is that now, living in the days that we live in, listening day in and day out to all of us, share the question that every single person is asking is, how do we make sense of this time that we’re living in?
How do we make meaning? Because friends, where we find ourselves and we keep talking about this in different ways, going back in terms of this parish’s life. Where we find ourselves is in one of those trough moments, if you will, where we’re no longer carried forward by the momentum of some wider moment in time that’s doing spiritual work for us, if you will.
As Thomas Merton said on his last day when he was giving a speech in Asia before he died, one of the last phrases that he told a group of nuns that he was speaking to was, “We’re all called to stand on our own feet now.” And Merton was challenging them to look at how you own your own practice of faith.
What do you need to be aware of? Where do you ground yourself? What anchors you? How do you invest your time? How is, as we say here, how is your life, your practice, and what are all the parts of your life that you’re called to pay attention to, to interrogate within your own heart so that you are grounded in something other than the whims of the culture around you in a very difficult time.
That’s the work that we’re called to do, and it pinches us because we don’t have, if you will, one of those wider moments carrying us on that momentum, as we keep saying we’re called in these days to use spiritual muscles that we have not had to use. That’s our world. That’s our common work right now to ask ourselves, what are we being called to do?
What is ours to own? What does discipleship look like for each and every one of us? And it’s in that context this year, at this time that we step into Lent on this day, on Ash Wednesday that challenges us, and that last line of the gospel that challenges us to ask ourselves, what is our treasure? What? How have we oriented our life?
What have we shaped our lives around? What’s the lens that we see the world through? Because it’s that line says, where our treasure is, our heart will be also. So we’re challenged during these days to really ask ourselves some difficult questions. We can’t do a lot about the wider context of the world, but we can do a lot about how we live our lives.
And that’s where true transformation takes place. If you ask me, it’s from the ground up, from those groundswell moments paying attention to how we order our days as we keep saying, paying attention on the first thing that we do in the morning is the first thing that we do in the morning to reach over and grab our phones and pull up the news to see how horrible that it really is.
It’s horrible. Spoiler alert. How do we order our lives? How do we spend our time? Where do we invest ourselves? How do we take care of our neighbors? How do we take care of our family? How do we take care of our lives? How do we live within our bodies and not just in our heads? How do we take time to rest during the day?
What do we surround ourselves with? Who do we surround ourselves with? Lent is so much more than about giving up chocolate. Who wants to give up chocolate? Lent is about this incredible time to ask ourselves these really important questions to interrogate our lives, to reflect on where our heart is actually anchored, where we are grounded. That’s the work that we’re called to do.
And when we see it in those lenses, I mean, in that lens, when I see it, what I have to admit to myself is I don’t have any time to despair. I don’t have time because I need to use my time, grounding myself, doing my practice, paying attention to my life, to those who I’m called to care for, my family, my friends, this parish, my neighbor who continually gets on my nerves.
But it’s one of the reasons that the Lord put him in my life, all of those things. So as you step into this season, I invite you to step in fully, stepping forward and pay attention to how the spirit is asking those things in your life, how the spirit is inviting you and challenging you to pay attention to how you spend your days, how you order your days.
And that will be, as we say, a truly holy Lent. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Citations:
Answer from Perplexity: pplx.ai/share