Giovanni Bellini, Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (1460)
Yesterday’s come-from-behind Olympic victory by Shaun White in the snowboarding halfpipe was both thrilling drama and breathtaking athleticism. Following a failure to medal in the last Olympics and a serious injury in competition just four months ago, his triumph fit the classic pattern of the hero’s journey: an arduous path “through many dangers, toils and snares” until the prize is won. But the hero’s journey, however inspiring, is not our Lenten theme. We walk a different way, practicing self-compassion in the dust and ashes of our own defeats.
Every Ash Wednesday, my favorite Winter Olympics story comes to mind. Readers may recall it from a 2016 post, but I offer it again here, prefaced by Mary Oliver’s Lenten antiphon:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.[i]
In the 1988 Winter Olympics, American speed skater Dan Jansen, the best in the world, was the consensus pick to win the 500 and 1000 meter events. On the morning of the 500 final, he learned his sister had just died from leukemia. His focus clearly elsewhere, he fell on the first turn of his race and never finished. He would also fall and fail in the 1000 meters. At the 1992 Olympics, he again failed to win the medals expected of him. The 1994 Olympics offered him one last chance, and he came to the line of the 500 meter race as the clear favorite, the only skater ever to break 36 seconds, which he had done four times. But after one slight slip on the ice, he finished out of the medals yet again.
Ash Wednesday came just after that race, and during the liturgy I reflected on Jansen’s story in my homily. Although Jansen would finally win a gold medal a few days later (in the one race where he was an underdog), it was his “failures” that resonated with people. After the liturgy, a therapist in the congregation told me that many of her clients that week had talked with her about Jansen’s story, and how much it moved them. If the world’s greatest skater could fall, then maybe it was all right for them to fall as well. You don’t have to be a hero, only your own flawed and unfinished self, letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
In his youth, the poet David Whyte was hiking in the Himalayas when he came to a deep chasm. The only way across was a rickety old rope bridge with many missing slats. Although he was a confident, experienced mountaineer, he suddenly froze at the prospect of traversing the abyss on so treacherous a path. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bridge for hours, unable to proceed. “There are times when the hero has to sit down,” he said later. “At some bridges in life the part of you that always gets it done has to sit down.” Then an old Tibetan woman came along, gathering yak dung for fuel. She walked with a limp. “Namaste,” she said with a smile. Then she turned and limped across the bridge. Immediately, without thinking, he rose up and followed. Sometimes, he realized, it is “the old interior angel,” the unheroic, limping, unequipped part of ourselves, that gets us to the other side.[ii]
Remember that you are dust, and no hero. Whether your Lent will be a time of giving up, going deep, or reaching out, may it always be done with a generous measure of self-compassion.
[i] Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” in Devotions (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 347.
[ii] Remembered from a David Whyte talk in the 1990s.
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again.
Hillesum’s evocative image expresses the duality of the Lenten season. On the one hand, God is not the end product of spiritual attainment, something brought closer through our own efforts. The deep well of divinity is already present within us, “more intimate to me than I am to myself.”[ii] We don’t have to go somewhere else to find it. Lent is a time to tune in, go deep, and pay heightened attention to the Presence we often miss.
At the same time, our awareness of – and relationship with – this Presence may be hindered or obstructed by any number of things, requiring some real digging on our part. The trouble is, that digging can quickly become a self-improvement project, with Lent’s success judged by the quality and success of our efforts. We imagine a more spiritually heroic self, and strive to make it come true.
The ancient Desert Fathers and Mothers, who fled the corruption and distractions of their culture to seek a holier life in the wastelands beyond Empire, might seem at first glance to be overflowing with heroic aspiration. A typical regimen would be to “get up early every day and acquire the beginning of every virtue and commandment of God. Use great patience, with fear and long-suffering, in the love of God, with all the fervor of your soul and body. Exercise great humility, bear with interior distress, be vigilant and pray often with reverence and groaning, with purity of speech and control of your eyes… Do your work in peace. Persevere in keeping vigil, in hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness, and in sufferings.”[iii]
Such rigorous spiritual practice wasn’t for the halfhearted. But it risked the competitive sin of pride. Paul of Pherme, for instance, undertook the project of “continual prayer” – 300 prayers per day, keeping count with a pile of 300 pebbles in his lap. After each prayer, he tossed away one pebble. But he was crestfallen to learn of a certain woman who had been saying 700 prayers per day for thirty years! He would never catch up. Another desert father, Macarius the Alexandrian, warned Paul that his spiritual life lacked both balance and humility. But Macarius was no moderate. He once did penance for swatting a mosquito by moving to a swamp to endure six months of insect bites, without ever raising a hand in defense.[iv]
Thankfully, the extremists were not the norm. More prevalent was a spirit of deep humility about one’s capacities. John Climacus was a seventh-century monk at Mt. Sinai. His image of the spiritual life as a “Ladder of Divine Ascent” was later pictured in a famous twelfth-century icon.
Ladder of Divine Ascent, St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mt. Sinai (12th century)
If you have ever climbed a very tall ladder, or done any rock-climbing, you know the degree of both effort and risk involved. John’s image makes it very clear that the spiritual life is strenuous and challenging. “We need to exercise ourselves greatly,” he wrote, “to lay upon ourselves many hidden labors after a life of negligence.” But then he said,
Be of good heart. If the passions lord it over us and we are weak, let us with great confidence offer to Christ our spiritual weakness and our impotence . . . He will help us irrespective of what we deserve, on the sole condition that we descend continually to the bottom, into the abyss of humility.[v]
So we don’t have to be heroes after all. What a relief! Humility, not heroism, is the way up the ladder. As the Rule of Saint Benedict teaches us, “by trying to climb we descend, and by humility we ascend.”[vi] That’s why Ash Wednesday strikes just the right note for the beginning of Lent. It brings us down to earth as creatures of ashes, dust and mud, undermining any pretensions of Promethean heroism. The Lenten journey is come-as-you-are.
Mary Oliver puts this perfectly: “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”[vii] Or as Simone Weil suggested, self-compassion means to “accept what one is, at a given moment, as a fact – even one’s shame.”
In the 1988 Winter Olympics, American speed skater Dan Jansen was favored in the 500 and 1000 meter events. On the morning of the 500 final, he learned his sister had just died from leukemia. His focus clearly elsewhere, he fell on the first turn of his race and never finished. He would also fall and fail in the 1000 meters. At the 1992 Olympics, he again failed to win the medals expected of him. The 1994 Oympics offered him one last chance, and he came to the line of the 500 meter race as the clear favorite, the only skater ever to break 36 seconds, which he had done four times. But after one slight slip on the ice, he finished out of the medals yet again.
Ash Wednesday came just after that race, and I reflected on Jansen’s story in my homily. Although Jansen would finally win a gold medal a few days later (in the one race where he was an underdog), it was his “failures” that resonated with people. After the liturgy, a therapist in the congregation told me that many of her clients that week had talked with her about Jansen’s story, and how much it moved them. If the world’s greatest skater could fall, then maybe it was all right for them to fall as well. You don’t have to be a hero, only yourself, letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
In his youth, the poet David Whyte was hiking in the Himalayas when he came to a deep chasm. The only way across was a rickety old rope bridge with many missing slats. Although he was a confident, experienced mountaineer, he suddenly froze at the prospect of traversing the abyss on so treacherous a path. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bridge for hours, unable to proceed. “There are times when the hero has to sit down,” he said later. “At some bridges in life the part of you that always gets it done has to sit down.” Then an old Tibetan woman came along, gathering yak dung for fuel. She walked with a limp. “Namaste,” she said with a smile. Then she turned and limped across the bridge. Immediately, without thinking, he rose up and followed. Sometimes, he realized, it is “the old interior angel,” the unheroic, limping, unequipped part of ourselves, that gets us to the other side.[viii]
Remember that you are dust, and no hero. Whether your Lent will be a time of giving up, going deep, or reaching out, may it always be done with a generous measure of self-compassion.
As Mary Gauthier sings so beautifully, we could all use a little mercy now.
[iii]The Apophthegmata (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), in William Harmless, S.J., Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 199-200
“Desert Words” from “Via Negativa” worship installation by Jim Friedrich
“The trouble with going to the desert is that you risk meeting God there.” These words of a French monk, which I heard decades ago in a documentary on the Little Brothers of Jesus, have haunted me ever since. Anyone who has spent serious time in the desert knows that the monk was right. Flee the culture’s house of mirrors for the counter-world of rocks and sand, silence and emptiness, and like Elijah you too may hear the “voice of thin silence.” You may meet the necessary Other.
I wrote these words in an introduction to my Lenten worship installation Via Negativa, an experiential journey through a symbolic desert. A worship installation is more like an art gallery than the theater model of traditional Western liturgy. Instead of finding a seat and remaining there (except for the Peace and Communion), you move around, follow your own path, pay attention at your own pace, linger where something in particular calls to you. An installation also resembles the labyrinth in being a mixture of both solitude and community. You do it in your own way, yet always aware that you make the journey in the company of fellow pilgrims.
The installation introduction goes on to say:
In this installation, you are invited to make your own exodus out of the ordinary into a desert made of signs, symbols and experiences. There is no path. You wander as you will, or as the Spirit wills, though the Burning Bush is best deferred until you have spent some time here.
There is a multitude of texts: like grains of sand they are too vast to consume in their entirety. But somewhere amid those endless texts are words that may whisper a message just for you. Open a book at random. Consider the many juxtapositions of word and image scattered around the space. Read the “the shifting language of sand, traces, and mirage.”[i] Inhabit “a fragile tent of words erected in the desert” where we are “struck with infinity and the letter.”[ii]
There are also images, sounds, places to linger, practices to enact. It is better not to hurry. There is no time in the desert, only space. Wander. Explore. Abide. Pay attention. Take off your shoes. You stand on holy ground.
The installation occupies three rooms. In the first room, there are images and texts representing the “Egypt” which need to be left behind – the personal and cultural distractions, distortions, oppressions and addictions which mar or obscure the goodness of creation and the Imago Dei within us all. A monitor shows a video loop of the Exodus story from The Electronic Campfire, a video I produced of creatively told biblical stories from the Easter Vigil.
The second room contains a small tent where you can listen to a recording of sayings and stories of the early Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers, playing softly from a small portable speaker. There are printed collections of these texts available as well. Sitting on a Persian carpet inside the tent, you may linger to hear and read the wisdom of those ancient spiritual explorers. A sign outside the entrance displays a key text from that tradition: Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
The third room represents the desert itself, that indeterminate space free of human constructs, which for millennia has drawn the hungry of spirit. As God tells Hosea, “I will lure her into the wilderness; there I will speak tenderly to her heart.”[iii] The video artist Bill Viola describes the value of this alternate reality as well as any:
“I want to go to a place that seems like it’s at the end of the world. A vantage point from which one can stand and peer out into the void – the world beyond… There is nothing to lean on. No references… You finally realize that the void is yourself. It is like some huge mirror for your mind. Clear and uncluttered, it is the opposite of our urban distractive spaces. Out here, the unbound mind can run free. Imagination reigns. Space becomes a projection screen. Inside becomes outside. You can see what you are.”[iv]
At the entrance to the third room, a sign invites you to take off your shoes before entering the “desert.” Once inside, you begin to read, see, hear, touch, smell, taste and do:
Torn fragments of a large desert map scattered across the entry floor, with a sign: “Throw away your maps.”
Dozens of magazine photographs and postcard images of the desert, each accompanied by a text related to desert spirituality. These numerous pairings of image and text are designed to provoke endless reflection.
Various books and guides on desert natural history, geology and spirituality.
Large signs hanging from the ceiling proclaiming key themes of desert spirituality, such as T. S. Eliot’s “Teach us to sit still, even among these rocks.”[v]
“Via Negativa” installation by Jim Friedrich
At different locations, three video monitors:
A slide show of desert wildflowers
A montage of desert film footage (time lapse of cloud shadows moving across dry landscapes, dreamlike images of humans and animals on sand dunes, the Temptation scene from Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew, and a desert father atop his 40-foot pillar in Luis Buñuel’sSimon of the Desert).
A live image of whoever is standing in front of the monitor, to which this text is attached: You do not go into the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous.[vi]
A large rectangle of sand containing over 70 words naming dimensions of the desert quest (deprivation, emptiness, hunger, listening, negation, repentance, solitude, tears, trial, unknowing, waiting, etc.) Each word seems on the verge of erasure by the enveloping sand.
“Desert Words” from “Via Negativa” worship installation by Jim Friedrich
A pile of rocks contains a couple of iPods. You can sit among the rocks, put on headphones, and listen to a trilogy of desert songs by the great Bob Franke: “Walking in the Wilderness,” “Israelite” (“nobody suffers here another night”), and “Holy Ground” (“on holy ground you better not play no tourist”)[vii]. Or you may be swept into trance by Steve Reich’s “Desert Music.”
A woven basket with “manna” (fry bread), water trickling from a pile of rocks with cups for drinking, and a pillar of fire (Paschal Candle), each with accompanying biblical texts.
The fragrance of sage incense and the recorded sounds of desert birds and insects.
Large medieval images of Jesus confronting Satan, hanging above a small table where a small New Testament is opened to the Temptation story. Also on the table: a plate with a bread-shaped stone, and a chalice filled with sand. Another text asks, “Can God make a banquet in the wilderness?”[viii]
Nearby, a ladder holds referents to Mt. Sinai on every rung: a book of Sinai photographs, incense grains from St. Catherine’s monastery at the foot of Sinai, a collection of sayings by St. Nilus of Sinai, a reproduction of the Sinai monastery’s famous icon, “The Ladder of Divine Ascent,” and – at the top of the ladder – the Ten Commandments in Hebrew and English.
Finally, the Burning Bush, reached by following a winding path of stones past a “veil” with the single word, Absence, on the front. When you reach the other side of the veil, the single word is Presence. set above an altar with a large photograph of a burning bush (Richard Misrach’s “Desert Fire #81”), illumined by many candles.
“Burning Bush” – Richard Misrach’s “Desert Fire #81” in “Via Negativa” worship installation
Of course, there is no substitute for doing the real desert in real time. I have never forgotten a solitary Lenten retreat years ago in California’s eastern Mojave – sleeping on sand dunes beneath the moon, listening to silence, trying (unsuccessfully) to pray the entire Psalter in one sitting in the cool of a remote cave. But you can’t become a desert father in a few days. My mind wandered. I failed to find the burning bush.
And yet my brief immersion in desert’s “no-where” lodged itself deep within me. The Via Negativa installation is an attempt to give it symbolic form. Like any liturgy, it compresses a universe of meaning into the space of an hour or two, providing mere glimpses and fragments. But perhaps – like any liturgy – it can plant a few seeds for God to cultivate in the fullness of time.
[i] David Jasper, The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) 181
The religious imagineer 