We Yearn To Return to You - Rend Your Heart

ASH WEDNESDAY

Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord, your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger,

abounding in steadfast love… Joel 2: 12-13

Ash Wednesday initiates the beginning of our 40-day pilgrimage from ashes to hope. Today we bear the mark of ashes that have been left behind from the burning of last year’s Palm Sunday branches. Ashes remind us of our relationship to the earth and our own death. “Deep within its darkness and dust lies the imprint of green, the memory of life, the awareness of what has gone before and of what may yet be. Ash Wednesday propels us into a season that inspires us to learn once again that what God creates and graces and blesses may be beset and broken but not destroyed” (J. Richardon). The 40 days ahead gives us the opportunity to assess compassionately who we are and who God desires us to become. This pilgrimage invites us to recognize our failures, our stumblings, where we are stuck and where we need to be made whole. It invites us to strip away all that distracts us from the God who dwells within. When we rend our hearts, somehow life finds its way: deserts bloom, winter turns to spring, beauty emerges from ruin, tears are mended, brokenness is made whole, lives are transformed.

Perhaps you are already feeling the weight of discouragement from the many months of dealing with Covid 19, difficult political divisions, our national crisis, violent uprisings, and natural disasters of fires and floods worldwide. Perhaps you are struggling with isolation or your own brokenness. In the midst of chaos sometimes one can feel numb to any sense of the Divine. The clutter in your heart, head and life often gets in the way of finding God and allowing God to find you. However you find yourself, there remains a yearning in the heart to return to God, to new life.

Accept this blessing as a mark of the pilgrimage you are about to begin.

Rend your Heart

To receive this blessing

all you have to do

is let your heart break.

Let it crack open.

Let it fall apart

so you can see its secret chambers,

the hidden spaces

where you have hesitated

to go.

Your entire life

is here, inscribed whole

upon your heart’s walls:

every path taken

or left behind,

every face you turned toward

or turned away,

every word spoken in love

or in rage,

every line of your life

you would prefer to leave

in shadows,

every story that shimmers

with treasures known

and those unknown

and those you have yet

to find.

It could take you days

to wander these rooms.

Forty at least.

And so let this be

a season for wandering,

for trusting the breaking,

for tracing the rupture

that will return you

to the One who waits,

who watches,

who works within

the rending

to make your heart

whole.

~ Jan Richardson

Song: Return to God, Marty Haugen

Return to God with all your heart, the source of grace and mercy;

Come seek the tender faithfulness of God

Now the time of grace has come, the day of salvation;

Come and learn now the way of our God. (Refrain)

I will take your heart of stone and place a heart within you,

A heart of compassion and love. (Refrain)

If you break the chains of oppression,

If you set the pris'ner free;

If you share your bread with the hungry,

Give protection to the lost;

Give shelter to the homeless,

Clothe the naked in your midst,

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn. (Refrain)

Reflection:

• Beneath what seems like it is dying or broken, what life might yet take hold and flourish?

• What might you need to let go of and become ash so that it may be transformed into something new?

• What is it like to “rend your heart?”

J. Richardson (2015). Circle of grace. Orlando, FL: Wanton Gospeller Press.