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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Jeremy Davies, Precentor on Ash Wednesday 17 February 2010
"ASH WEDNESDAY"
Teach us to care and not to care;
Teach us to sit still
It’s entirely appropriate that on this day, and in preparation for Lent, I should have been reading a poem by T S Eliot called Ash Wednesday 1930. Entirely appropriate that is until you come to read it and discover what a struggle this poem is. You might say that it’s poems like this that give poetry a bad name. On the other hand, if you’re more generously disposed, you might say it’s entirely appropriate that Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday should be a struggle of the intellect and the imagination to balance the moral and spiritual struggle which this day and the Lenten forty days represent.
The poem falls into six distinct sections: one for every week of Lent: so perhaps I’ll take one section at a time and report back to you during Holy Week. Rather like reading the bible, it is full of memorable moments, familiar phrases (taken from the liturgy or scripture) and you feel it is saying something, perhaps something interesting and important, but you can’t quite fathom it, make sense of it. But it’s intriguing enough in its opaqueness to keep calling you back to discover its deeper meaning. Just like the bible.
I have already discovered that were I to pursue an in-depth analysis of Eliot’s poem, it would involve interesting byways into Dante, Lancelot Andrews, St John of the Cross, as well as the scriptures and the Church’s liturgy – all of which were recurring influences in T S Eliot’s poetry. And fascinating though such a discourse might be, I think we’d find it a bit more of a penance than we had envisaged for ourselves in Lent this year. So let me content myself with just a few simple lines from this extended poem in which Eliot wrestles with the opposing attractions of worldliness and godliness:
“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying”
is how the poem puts it.
The lines in particular I want to consider, Eliot uses in the first section of the poem, and repeats them in the final section.
“Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still”
Those few words encapsulate a thought which may repay our further reflection during the forty days of Lent – this “joyful season” as the preface to the Great Prayer has it.
“Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still”
In all the soul searching about what we are going to give up for Lent, we are following an ancient tradition of mortifying the flesh in the belief that such denials will liberate the spirit and deepen our spiritual awareness and an appetite for the things of God. Actually I think that such abstinence, which is followed in one way or another by all the great world religions, may well issue in a spiritual deepening. And that surely is the point of Lent – to recall us to principles and priorities that are easily overlaid, or ignored or forgotten in the busyness and pressure of the day when seamlessly the idols of modern life take over and become our gods, without one even noticing the shift.
Teach us to sit still: possibly the most important of the three, certainly the point from which much else flows, may be the most difficult to achieve. In a way it is the simplest, but it does involve a discipline of time and attention. And because it can so easily be dispensed with, squeezed out, and because no-one keeps us to account, it is the most vulnerable. The poet W H Davies asked the question:
“What is life if full of care
We have no time to stop and stare.”
Lent may be the opportunity we need to recover a certain contemplative poise, a moment to sit still, to still our bodies and the much more difficult task (I find) of stilling our minds which race on to the next commitment or the next enticement. If fasting (the traditional discipline for Lent and not a bad one) helps us to empty the stomach: then sitting still is the help we need to empty the mind. Why do we need to empty the mind? So that it can be filled with the good things that God lavishes on us if we were not so sated with the orgy of trivia that usually preoccupies us. We need to go into one room as the scripture bids us, shut the door, and pray to our Father who is in secret: and he will reward us.
Teach us to sit still: Teach us not to care. The sermon on the mount from which this evening’s gospel is drawn is quoted often for its poetic vision of the kingdom – like birds of the air and the lilies of the field. But the point of that poetry is to recall us to a wisdom that human beings – certainly western, pampered, controlling human beings – have all but lost. The sermon on the mount with prayer at its heart is teaching us “not to care”. Not to be careless but to cast care aside. Just after the passage about not parading our religion, Jesus says to the disciples, and over their shoulders to us:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear … Consider the lilies of the field which neither toil nor spin; not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as these are. But you are worth more than the flowers of the field and your Father in heaven knows what you need. So cast care aside and strive for God’s kingdom and everything else will be given to you as well.”
That is so simple, and yet so hard. Perhaps that is what Lent is for: a godly school in which we can learn to be careless, in which we can learn to trust, and come to recognise the Father who knows our needs before we ask and our ignorance in asking.
Teach us to sit still, teach us not to care and then finally teach us to care.
We need to learn as Christian people to care less, to be less anxious, less driven, more trusting in order that in T S Eliot’s paradoxical phrase, we can care more – care more for the other, rather than ourselves: the person in need, of course; the sick, the imprisoned, the impoverished, the naked. Yes of course: we must care for them and we do. But what about people whose need is less apparent, and who do not claim our pity in the same way: asylum seekers, those of other faiths, gay people, people we ignore; or causes or issues or concerns: things that don’t directly or immediately affect our comfort or our way of life. They are not in our backyard – so we don’t care and we should.
Perhaps the forty days of Lent are an opportunity to learn to sit still, to learn not to care so that by God’s good grace we may learn to care, in his name and for his glory.
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Teach us to sit still
It’s entirely appropriate that on this day, and in preparation for Lent, I should have been reading a poem by T S Eliot called Ash Wednesday 1930. Entirely appropriate that is until you come to read it and discover what a struggle this poem is. You might say that it’s poems like this that give poetry a bad name. On the other hand, if you’re more generously disposed, you might say it’s entirely appropriate that Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday should be a struggle of the intellect and the imagination to balance the moral and spiritual struggle which this day and the Lenten forty days represent.
The poem falls into six distinct sections: one for every week of Lent: so perhaps I’ll take one section at a time and report back to you during Holy Week. Rather like reading the bible, it is full of memorable moments, familiar phrases (taken from the liturgy or scripture) and you feel it is saying something, perhaps something interesting and important, but you can’t quite fathom it, make sense of it. But it’s intriguing enough in its opaqueness to keep calling you back to discover its deeper meaning. Just like the bible.
I have already discovered that were I to pursue an in-depth analysis of Eliot’s poem, it would involve interesting byways into Dante, Lancelot Andrews, St John of the Cross, as well as the scriptures and the Church’s liturgy – all of which were recurring influences in T S Eliot’s poetry. And fascinating though such a discourse might be, I think we’d find it a bit more of a penance than we had envisaged for ourselves in Lent this year. So let me content myself with just a few simple lines from this extended poem in which Eliot wrestles with the opposing attractions of worldliness and godliness:
“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying”
is how the poem puts it.
The lines in particular I want to consider, Eliot uses in the first section of the poem, and repeats them in the final section.
“Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still”
Those few words encapsulate a thought which may repay our further reflection during the forty days of Lent – this “joyful season” as the preface to the Great Prayer has it.
“Teach us to care and not to care,
Teach us to sit still”
In all the soul searching about what we are going to give up for Lent, we are following an ancient tradition of mortifying the flesh in the belief that such denials will liberate the spirit and deepen our spiritual awareness and an appetite for the things of God. Actually I think that such abstinence, which is followed in one way or another by all the great world religions, may well issue in a spiritual deepening. And that surely is the point of Lent – to recall us to principles and priorities that are easily overlaid, or ignored or forgotten in the busyness and pressure of the day when seamlessly the idols of modern life take over and become our gods, without one even noticing the shift.
Teach us to sit still: possibly the most important of the three, certainly the point from which much else flows, may be the most difficult to achieve. In a way it is the simplest, but it does involve a discipline of time and attention. And because it can so easily be dispensed with, squeezed out, and because no-one keeps us to account, it is the most vulnerable. The poet W H Davies asked the question:
“What is life if full of care
We have no time to stop and stare.”
Lent may be the opportunity we need to recover a certain contemplative poise, a moment to sit still, to still our bodies and the much more difficult task (I find) of stilling our minds which race on to the next commitment or the next enticement. If fasting (the traditional discipline for Lent and not a bad one) helps us to empty the stomach: then sitting still is the help we need to empty the mind. Why do we need to empty the mind? So that it can be filled with the good things that God lavishes on us if we were not so sated with the orgy of trivia that usually preoccupies us. We need to go into one room as the scripture bids us, shut the door, and pray to our Father who is in secret: and he will reward us.
Teach us to sit still: Teach us not to care. The sermon on the mount from which this evening’s gospel is drawn is quoted often for its poetic vision of the kingdom – like birds of the air and the lilies of the field. But the point of that poetry is to recall us to a wisdom that human beings – certainly western, pampered, controlling human beings – have all but lost. The sermon on the mount with prayer at its heart is teaching us “not to care”. Not to be careless but to cast care aside. Just after the passage about not parading our religion, Jesus says to the disciples, and over their shoulders to us:
“Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear … Consider the lilies of the field which neither toil nor spin; not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as these are. But you are worth more than the flowers of the field and your Father in heaven knows what you need. So cast care aside and strive for God’s kingdom and everything else will be given to you as well.”
That is so simple, and yet so hard. Perhaps that is what Lent is for: a godly school in which we can learn to be careless, in which we can learn to trust, and come to recognise the Father who knows our needs before we ask and our ignorance in asking.
Teach us to sit still, teach us not to care and then finally teach us to care.
We need to learn as Christian people to care less, to be less anxious, less driven, more trusting in order that in T S Eliot’s paradoxical phrase, we can care more – care more for the other, rather than ourselves: the person in need, of course; the sick, the imprisoned, the impoverished, the naked. Yes of course: we must care for them and we do. But what about people whose need is less apparent, and who do not claim our pity in the same way: asylum seekers, those of other faiths, gay people, people we ignore; or causes or issues or concerns: things that don’t directly or immediately affect our comfort or our way of life. They are not in our backyard – so we don’t care and we should.
Perhaps the forty days of Lent are an opportunity to learn to sit still, to learn not to care so that by God’s good grace we may learn to care, in his name and for his glory.