An Ash Wednesday Invitation
Two years ago, the world began walking the strange, unfamiliar path of Covid, and today we are still stumbling our way forward. What began as a challenge we perhaps thought we could get through together has become a road of dualistic division. Bit by bit, we have become more distanced from and less compassionate toward one another. We’ve gotten good at thinking badly about each other, jumping to conclusions, and assigning motives. I’m beginning to worry that once this is all over (whatever that means), we may not be able to retrace our steps back to goodwill and basic kindness.
In this belligerent and bewildered state, we arrive once again at Ash Wednesday, the beginning of our annual Lenten journey of repentance, fasting, self-denial, and spiritual discipline. Recently a friend asked me, “What are you giving up for Lent this year?” I said, “This year I’m just giving up.” That may be the melancholy of the pandemic talking, but maybe that’s the exact mental roadblock we all need to compel us to consider what Lent can be: a turning point.
On Ash Wednesday, people all over the world receive the imposition of ashes on their foreheads, typically accompanied by one of two phrases: “Know that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” or “Repent and believe in the good news.” Both come from turning points in Scripture—the first in Genesis 3, spoken by God to Adam before he is banished from the Garden, and the second in Mark 1, declared by Jesus as he begins his public ministry. Both phrases invoke change and challenge—to turn away from something, to turn toward something, to re-turn to something.
We need to hear these words today. Like Adam, we need to be reminded of our own mortality in order to recognize how precious life is—how fleeting, how tragic and triumphant, how unbearably burdensome and unbelievably beautiful all at once. In remembering that we will return to dust, we recognize the mortality of others. That shared humanity may be just where we start to re-turn to one another.
And like those hearing Jesus’s declaration of the coming kingdom, we need to repent and believe in the good news. The word for repent—metanoia—means to change one’s mind, to turn around and face in a new direction. When we repent, we turn away from dead-end thinking that leads us astray from God’s intended course for our lives and our shared life together, and we turn toward the good news that brings us back into deeper fellowship with God and with each other.
Beginning on Ash Wednesday, our Lenten journey can be the turning point we all need. Ruth Haley Barton reminds us, “The disciplines of fasting and other kinds of abstinence help us to abstain from that which distracts us and numbs our awareness so that we can become more finely attuned to what is really going on in our lives spiritually and the invitations that are there for us.”
Our divisions are continually reinforced by this influx of information and disinformation that constantly assures us we are right and that anyone who disagrees with us is to be feared, hated, derided, and excluded.
I believe that unchecked intake of social media, including major news sources such as CNN and Fox News, is a powerful distraction that not only numbs our own awareness but also poisons our society. This year I suggest that we all take a break for Lent.
Last April, Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology testified at a Senate hearing about the algorithms used by social media platforms and the business model of these companies that targets human attention: “At the end of the day, a business model that preys on human attention means that we are worth more as human beings and as citizens of this country when we are addicted, outraged, polarized, narcissistic, and disinformed because that means that the business model was successful at steering our attention using automation….These companies profit by turning the American conversation into a cacophony, into a kind of Hobbesian war of all-against-all, because that is the business model…of everyone getting a chance to speak and have it go viral to millions of people. So long as that is the promise with personalization, we’re each going to be steered into a different rabbit hole of reality.”
“Different rabbit holes of reality” is a hauntingly accurate description of what we’re experiencing right now in the landscape of social media: hours of our days spent in carefully curated echo chambers assuring us that we are right and they—whoever “they” might be—are wrong. We become exactly the outraged, polarized, and narcissistic people these companies need us to be to turn a profit, and they mete out whatever confirmation bias their algorithms determine will keep us coming back for more.
Our divisions are continually reinforced by this influx of information and disinformation that constantly assures us we are right and that anyone who disagrees with us is to be feared, hated, derided, and excluded. I wish I could say the church is a safe haven from this kind of thinking, but I’ve witnessed the Covid civil wars happening in congregations. I’ve heard people accuse others of not being “real Christians,” and I’ve heard people twist freedom in Christ into a license for abandoning our responsibility for and accountability to our neighbors in the pews.
In the words of Richard Rohr: “It is all dualistic, win or lose. The egocentric will still dominate the need to be right, the need to be first, the need to think I am saved and other people are not. This is the lowest level of human consciousness, and God cannot be heard from that heady place. Perhaps it is not accidental that we place the ashes of Ash Wednesday precisely on the forehead.”
We need Ash Wednesday now more than ever. I invite you to join me in taking a break from social media for Lent. Let’s give our time and attention to really listening to other people and to God instead of endlessly scrolling the newsfeeds. Let us repent and turn away from our bad behaviors and toward the good news that the kingdom of God has come near. In that kingdom, the meek will inherit the earth, and peacemakers are blessed; in that kingdom, we turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, and love even our enemies. May Lent be a turning point that brings us into that kingdom of God.
