Ash Wednesday
On the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, I confess that I am "the first among sinners." Why? Because all that I see and all that I know is apprehended through the shattered lens of my own ego, distorted by the mind that superimposes its shadow, and blurs its own vision. The world appears to me just as my mind is. So the Yoga scriptures declare: "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: as the mind is, so the world appears."
The profoundly realistic Christian vision of Sin is precisely the teaching of
Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. We do not see the true divine creation around
us, we see only the projection of this mind. The problem of human living
becomes: how can we learn to see through the eye of the heart, an eye freed
from the gray clouds of thought? Jesus called this "the single eye."
He said, "If your eye is single, your whole body will be filled with
light."
But most of us New Agers have nought but disdain for the notion of Sin. Just
ask the sinner if he has any use for such an outmoded concept! Reality is too
scary. The first of sinners is the last to confess, "I am a sinner. My
very mind, my very eye, is fractured by my own self-seeking."
How can a shattered lens see the world as anything but shattered? How can the
corrupted mind do anything but project the shadows of its own corruption on
others, blaming the adversary rather than its own pride for the injustices of
the nation? Yes, this is a dark vision, so dark that my vision eclipses even
the sun. I cannot gaze into it.
On Ash Wednesday I remember, it's not just my body that returns to dust and
ashes, but all my strategies to save myself.
When will I stop being outraged over this injustice or that injustice? When
will I stop frantically blaming the other party? When will I stop desperately
clinging to my mind's solutions: this new political policy, this new candidate,
this new ideology? The truth is, no ism will save me from my own mind - neither
socialism nor capitalism, humanism or Islamism, Protestantism or Catholicism,
multiculturalism or nationalism, non-dualism or evangelism - because all isms
are inventions of the mind, and the problem is mind itself.
Can the human will fix itself, when
what needs fixing is self-will? To see this dilemma is not despair, but
awakening. Despair is trying everything else.
What's pathetic about my "modern" "progressive" mind is
that it cannot see itself, because it is identified with itself, so it projects
its own blurred vision onto others, seeking some convenient scapegoat or
political group to blame for the distortions caused by the cracks in the very
lens through which it sees.
I am too hip, too "enlightened" to use such a term as
"Sin." Yet what reveals itself this first morning of Lent is the very
truth of man's iniquity. Is it a gloomy truth? No. It is holy clarity, and
blessed self-reckoning. Sin is not a list of naughty little deeds that I have
done. Sin is my state of separateness.
I have fallen and separated myself, through the noise of my own mind, from the
divine silence at the source of Being. I am stranded on the island of Me in a
sea of thoughts, stories, memories and desires, and I don't know how to get
back. Now a sail appears on the horizon, and the Westerly wind that gently
carries it toward me is the breath of the Holy Spirit. Through the fog I see a
divine Other approaching, from the land beyond thought, beyond the rim of the
mind. Yet that land is not above me, or outside my body. It lies in the core of
my heart, deeper inside me than I am.
Now I behold with a clear naked seeing: the corrupted programs of my human will
are only erased by the grace of the Friend, whose will is not this dark
confused thought-stream, but a beam of changeless radiance that pours out of my
center. There is only mischief in my mind's ceaseless blame,
self-justification, and intellectualizing. The one and only solution to this
dark world- problem is grace, a grace that never comes from "me." It
bubbles up from the well-spring of divine love, more inward than any thought or
belief I could have.
Can we taste this grace, and gaze into its Sun, and become instruments of its
healing beauty? Yes, the wise tell us, if we're humble enough to listen to
their ancient voices still ringing in the empty bell of Now. We taste grace in
true prayer, in meditation, “in the heart's silence, free of all thoughts,
where the heart breathes God.” *
* St. Hesychius of Jerusalem, 5th C.
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