It has been my habit now to preach Ash Wednesday without manuscript or notes. Here's the story I told, and why I told it.
Spring on Long Island where I grew up meant at one point Dad would arise from his chair and announce, "It's time for the boat." My verbal response was "OK Dad." My inner response was "Oh God, not again!"
For the boat was an 18 foot wooden "runabout", with an ancient outboard motor, that had wintered upside-down on sawhorses in the side yard. Wooden boats basically dissolve slowly in salt water. Hence the boat had all the effects of last season's deterioration plus the ravages of a New York winter.
Barnacles and flaking paint had to be scraped. New primer and paint, especially that potent thick red bottom paint, had to be carefully applied respecting the lines traced with masking tape. A number of repairs needed to be effected, and new fiberglass pads and strips needed to be applied to the stem and along the seams.
It was a lot of work. But if you wanted to cruise, you had to do your work.
To a ten year old boy, it seemed endless and excruciating, although I no doubt did only a dollop of what was necessary. I never remember Dad complaining. I think, as he contentedly scraped, painted, hammered, that in his mind's eye he was already out on the open water, wind in his hair, sun on his face, feeling the wooden boat sway and flex beneath him, not an object on the water so much as a living part of the water, alive and endlessly moving as does the sea itself.
I think of the boat as I think of this Lent.
None of us need to add articifial burdens to what we already carry. I became rebellious against what seemed to be an obligation to have a gloomy Lent, something one dreads, the season in which we make it tougher on ourselves because God likes it tough. In those days of a kind of gothic Catholic piety, Easter came not as a joy and delight but as simple relief--thank God that's over for another year!
But Lent is a gift and a joy. It is the season when we recall to whom we have been called--the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. We recall that we are pilgrims. We drop the burdens that we may have laid upon ourselves, or that the world has laid upon us. Do we labor under the need to keep up false appearances of invulnerability, of self-sufficiency, of "having it all together" like the hypocrites of Matthew's Gospel (Mt 6: 1-6, 16-21)? They have "already received their reward", the pathetic self-satisfaction and ego-gratification of having it "all together" and having received recognition for it. In return they have the burden of keeping up the pretense for the next time, and the next...
In Lent we may lay aside the burdens laid upon us or that we lay upon ourselves. Do we always need to be right? Do we always need to seem to have it "all together"? If we suffer from money woes, do we let the world shame us or demean us as "poor"? If we are ill or in pain, do we let that illness or pain tell us that we are nothing but illness or pain?
We may lay it down. In turn we may step lightly, with joy, as we learn again from the lips of Jesus who we truly are and what we are called to do and not called to do. My favorite line from Jesus' instructions on spiritual practice in Matthew's Gospel is "Do not be dismal, like the hypocrites..." I have a sense of lightness of foot this Lent, and I like it.
In Lent, we honor the longing and the preparing.
In the Western church, we veil the statues and other sacred images, and we lay aside the Easter-shout "alleluia" until the Great Vigil. We do so to honor the fact that in this life we see at best only partially, we are on a journey, what we shall be and who God truly is has not yet been revealed. We are pilgrims, and pilgrims do not stay in one place. We honor the longing, the pilgrim desire to see and walk into our true and lasting home.
And we honor the preparing. Saint Benedict said that, although the life of the monk is supposed to be a perpetual Lent (!), still in this season it's good to put forth a little extra effort. In the freedom given us by Christ, we do have the strength to quietly examine our lives and see where barnacles have accumulated, where old paint, old ways and habits, need to be scraped in order that fresh paint be applied.
Because we are meant to cruise on the open sea. We are meant for the voyage. Christ is the longing, and the hand that steadies ours as we do what work each of us needs to do. Christ is the setting-out and the open sea and the wind. Christ is the far shore, for the moment just beyond the horizon, where we are meant to beach at last.
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