On being dark and cold

For many Christians, Lent begins with the words ‘remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ It sounds, and quite possibly is, morbid and dark: I, like Adam, am formed of the dust of the earth, and to it this mortal body will return with terrible finality. There is something deeply uncomfortable to this realisation and in our culture it is proper neither to dwell on this certainty nor to remind others of it. Perhaps this quaint tradition, in all its confident pessimism, will itself die a death, the phrase gathering dust and bookworms with the rest of the liturgy, in rotting sheds and neglected archives.

‘Ashed’ recently for the first time, a friend wrote of the ‘ugly smear on [his] soul’ that is ‘indelibly there’. For him this improper, uncomfortable realisation has been a teachable moment: still like me in his early 20s, those words are for him too. Montaigne thought to philosophise was to learn to die. Perhaps the same is true of being catechised. How shall I sing knows this: the words invite the congregation to ‘let dust in dust and silence lie.’ Death is many things and one of them is silence; I had better learn to start being silent at least occasionally. It is not dust’s to boast arrogantly: ‘God is in heaven but you are on the earth: therefore let your words be few’.

In keeping this silence, we mortal children are better able to hear the song of the heavenly choir. In the bewildering multitude of those who are God’s, at first I can lose myself for the massed thousands, or, like Zacchaeus, feel I don’t rightly belong there. But as in Psalm 8, the ‘who am I?’ here needn’t land so much in frustrated anonymity as in stupefied awe: who am I, that my praise makes the slightest difference to Him whom millions of angels admire? A life of praise, transformed by God’s renewing, is ‘holy and pleasing to Him’.

Thy brightness unto them appears, whilst I Thy footsteps trace;

A sound of God comes to my ears: but they behold Thy face!

They sing because Thou art their sun; Lord, send a beam on me,

For where heav’n is but once begun, there Alleluias be.

One of the beautiful things of which Lent reminds us is that there is more to come for the Christian. That He reveals His character in His word, His world, and supremely by His Son is a great gift. But still the sun is my sun, not yet outshone by His glory. So often my experience in this life feels like that of the beloved in Song of Songs: ‘All night long in my bed I looked for the one my heart loves: I looked for him but did not find him.’ His sound comes to my ears; I trace his footsteps like a bloodhound. All the while I envy the angels and the saints above – for they behold His face!

But another beautiful Lenten thing is that there is much for the Christian now. Scripture doesn’t hesitate to hold these things together: ‘the Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him’; ‘though you do not see him now, you… are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy’. The sound of God in my ears is an occasion of great joy, which is for now ‘inexpressible’. There is blessing in the longing and the looking. We remember that at Advent too, but in Lent as we trace His footsteps through the desert and the parched land, we draw comfort in the confidence that it will burst into blossom like the crocus. We fast because of the feast. For now, I wonder how to sing: the answer will be ‘Alleluia’.

Enlighten with faith’s light my heart; inflame it with love’s fire.

Then shall I sing, and bear a part with the celestial choir!

I shall, I fear, be dark and cold with all my fire and light,

Yet when Thou dost accept their gold, Lord, treasure up my mite.

The poet, and the singer like him, realises that over 3 verses he has been answering his own question. ‘How shall I sing that Majesty?’ The question is a possible answer. Looking back in wonder at the first verses of the hymn, the singer sees at last a mite that he has deposited in God’s treasury. How shall I sing that Majesty? Like that!

Contemplating God’s character – His Majesty – drives me away from my own fire and light. So does Lent and so does silence. This is a good thing. My fire and light is dark and cold; my fasting and silence burns with love’s fire.

John Mason, 1646-94