Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen
(The Collect for the Third Sunday in Lent)
I live in Concord, not far from Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau spent that famous year living alone in a one-room house in the woods, contemplating nature and examining life lived with only the barest necessities. It was a hermit’s life, in a way, although not driven by hunger for any immaterial heaven. Thoreau wanted to pay attention to this life in this world, to know it truly and face it honestly:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
(from Walden, chapter 2: “Where I lived and what I lived for”)
Thoreau’s patron and intellectual mentor was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great philosopher of self-reliance. The two men shared the thought experiment of Thoreau’s year in the woods: to test what life could be if it were lived unencumbered by mind-numbing labor and wearying responsibilities, nourished by a right relation to wild nature, free to contemplate things in themselves.
Thoreau’s local contemporaries, those Concord farmers and merchants, teachers and town officials for whose encumbered and settled lives Thoreau regularly and publicly expressed disdain, returned his sentiment, back at him. They regarded him as something of a crackpot. The story is told that, one night during that year of solitary self-reliance, Thoreau was at the Emerson’s dinner table holding forth on the spiritual excellence of material simplicity. Emerson’s wife Lydian, nearly worn out by her duties of hospitality for the steady stream of intellectuals who arrived on the Cambridge coach to visit with her famous husband, wryly observed: “No wonder you can live so simply in the woods, dear Henry, you’re here every night for dinner!”
However archly she made it, Mrs. Emerson had a point. While it is fine to think and choose for yourself, and to draw from deep within your own mind and spirit all things necessary to live authentically, in reality, no man is an island, entire of itself — and no woman, and certainly no child.
Our well being depends upon others. At birth, we need adults who will nourish and protect us for many years. Lifelong, we need community to build and sustain schools and hospitals and systems of production and transportation that deliver food and fresh water and gas and electricity and the thousand other things that sustain us. Most acutely when we suffer disease, or accident, or when with age our powers begin to fail — we need others to help, to be decent, to be faithful. To live fully, we need communities of memory and shared meaning. The lives we enjoy rely on countless interdependent systems of cooperation. Ironically, self-reliance itself flowers and is sustained within a vast system of interdependence.
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In the Episcopal liturgy, the ‘opening collect’ is a statement of the theme of the day or of the season. If the liturgy were a symphony, the opening collect would be the first statement of the dominant motif. On this third Sunday of Lent, we read a collect to focus this season of repentance. Now, if you ever thought repentance means wallowing in guilt, look again.
Today’s opening prayer, this brief ‘collect,’ doesn’t negate that we are moral agents with responsibility for our choices and their consequences: we are. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t exert our best efforts in our work and in bettering our lives: we should. It doesn’t even mean that Thoreau and Emerson were wrong when they wrote about self-reliance: they were telling part of the story of the moral life.
But there is much more. For this also is true, something that many of us when we are young and strong would rather not admit, especially to ourselves: life is fragile. It all can be changed or lost in a moment. At the same time, we are morally fragile. On the evidence, whether individually or in the aggregate, the ways we use freedom and power are tinged with selfishness or distorted by self-loathing. The good we would do? We are liable to do just the opposite.
So this prayer, written in the 16th century, faces existential insecurity like a modern: it acknowledges our neediness at a metaphysical level. We have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.
That insight can be liberating, freeing us from the egocentric illusion of control; we are not in charge of the world. We are not even in charge of ourselves! So give it up; let it be; it is what it is: you are only human, and so are all the others!
But it the prayer does not leave it at that. While this prayer ‘owns’ human frailty, at the same time, it claims the grace of reliance on God. It invites the relationship of trust in steadfast love; trust that our moral choices and our very lives are in the hands of the higher power that is there for us. In this light, repentance is turning from the illusion of omnipotence to reliance on the power of mercy:
Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.
This Lenten motif flows into the readings from Scripture offered today: Moses encounters a burning mystery in the wilderness — a power intent to strengthen and sustain him for the great work of liberating a people from oppression that gives only the mysterious name I AM. St. Paul underscores the reality of moral frailty: if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. Jesus responds to questions about why bad things happen to good people: not by any fault of theirs, but because life is fragile. Therefore repent, that is, turn to the holy mystery who stands in your path saying in a million different ways: I AM — LEAN ON ME — TRUST ME — I WILL BE THERE TO CATCH YOU WHEN YOU FALL.
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Repentance is the practice of awareness of grace at the heart of life. Here’s a suggestion. Many Christians give up something for Lent. How about this lent give up stress? Take a Lenten Sabbath: one twenty four hour period. A Sabbath from work or shopping, from the Internet and e-mail and telephone and paying bills and figuring taxes. Don’t do any church projects.
Instead: have your own twenty-four hour Walden Pond. Awake with the light. Fast, for the way it focuses the mind, or, if it is better for you, eat well. Read for pleasure. Take a long bath. Go for a walk and see the neighborhood, really see nature. Nap. Enjoy family and/or friends. Pray. Give yourself the Sabbath gift of a whole day to live deliberately, to front only what is essential, and see if you don’t become more grateful for life, more free to trust the graceful presence whose only name is the same as yours: I AM.