Return to Me with all your hearts...

And so, thank God once a year we gather to speak the truth of how we piece out our hearts, how we sin and fall short, how we rely on every single other thing to love us – everything but God. How we love each other and are loved by each other so poorly with the small leftover bits of our hearts after we’ve given most of them and time to career advancement and saving the world and saving for our future and destroying gems and buying fake cows on Facebook and the dull pain of chemical dependency and internet porn and sugar binges and crossfit and the next spiritual practice or restricted diet that promises to make us whole. It’s not our time that’s so wasted with all of it…I think it’s something so much more valuable… I think it’s our hearts.

So together again this Ash Wednesday with the faithful all across the world we gather all the pieces of our broken selves…all the broken you deserve a break today pieces of our starving little hearts and we come again here to be told, of all things, that we are dust and to dust we shall return. The very thing we are trying to pretend is not true. Because I think we give our hearts away because we’re afraid of the limits of our self-hood… so we create endless ways to either avoid our self-hood or expand our self-hood. In other words, we sin. And all of it…and I hate to be so cliché, but basically, when it comes down to it, all of it is about the fact that we’re afraid to die. And as a giving our hearts away afraid to die people you’d think hearing you are dust and to dust you shall return would be pretty bad news, but not so. Because here’s the thing: in the creation story in Genesis 2 it says that the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.