The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
Some months ago I referenced a Church sign in a sermon that read, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” Today we begin our Lenten journey. This ritual season of 40 days and 40 nights is often characterized by self-examination, prayer, repentance, and discipline. I submit to you that our Lenten journey in essence is an exploration of what it means to be truly ourselves. I do not suggest this exploration as an exercise of narcissism as our culture might encourage, but rather to explore your lives through a lens of belief that we are created by a God whose power is love. So powerful is this love that it dares to take the very dust of the ground and call us into being so that we might be delighted in, find delight, create, and experience the depth of love, in essence, come to know ourselves as the once who created us knows us, discover who we are!
The exploration of who we truly are must lead us into the knowledge and truth that this gift of life in love is not just for us as individuals but belongs to everyone. All of us are created out of love and dust. We are inextricably bound together and made to be in relationship with the one who loved us into being and with one another. These relationships call us to live with authenticity, faithfulness, and integrity!
Our experience has taught us, however, that there are times and moments when we are not aligned with life in such a way. Just as remembering that we are dust reminds us of God’s creative moment and our interconnection with our brothers and sisters of dust, we also are reminded that on our own our struggle to live that life is often colored with limitation. “And to Dust you shall return.” Our lives are finite, the dust of which we are made does sometimes grow tired and weary, and sometimes it is filled with dis-ease. With an eye only to the dust and not on the creative love that called it into being, we sometimes forget our interconnection and interdependence. We sometimes are fooled into placing our value in a narcissistic adventure of who we are that leads us to selfishness, hatred, disregard and offense. We know this about the dust, we have experienced it, and we are it. With an eye leaning back toward the love that calls the dust into being we know deep in our hearts that we cannot hate, disregard, offend, do harm to another being of the ash without in essence hating, disregarding, offending, and doing harm to ourselves. We know this in our minds and in our hearts, and we know too often it is a script we find ourselves participating in; it is a script of sin.
Today, should you choose, you will wear the mark of dust on your forehead and you will be reminded of the depth of opportunity and challenge that comes with our call into being. We are given the opportunity to embrace the depth of what it is to live a life that aligns itself with the intentions of what is was created for. The journey to come into the fullness of who we truly are is the opportunity to discover through experience the depth of what it is to love. This exploration will place before the God who created us and our brothers and sisters created of the very same love and dust our failures, disappointments, and disillusionments. Discovering and naming the limitations that impede our faithfulness and integrity to our relationships, we rend our hearts wide open. We invite the creative love to fill the gap and to move us to make right what needs to be made right, and restore us to union with God and our neighbors. In essence, coming into our own, discovering who we are. Blessed journey.
