Lent – living my best life?
Canon Kathryn | Isaiah 58.1-12, Matthew 6.1-6, 16-21
If you had to pick a word or phrase which you never want to hear again, what would it be? Recent contenders I’ve come across include ‘With respect…’, so often used in an argument to introduce something inherently disrespectful, and ‘thinking outside the box’. In wondering what my phrase of choice would be, I have realised that there are two interrelated ones, both of them quite popular at the moment: ‘living my best life’, and ‘being my best self’. Neither of them sounds on the face of it like too bad a concept, so I have been forced to examine why I have such a visceral, fingernails-down-the-blackboard reaction to them.
Part of it has to do with the fact that, probably like many of us, I have an acute sense of not being my best self, much of the time, so the phrase makes me feel a bit shabby. But there’s more to it than that. For a start, the concepts of best self and best life are entirely self-referential. Inevitably, in this sort of equation, the one who judges whether I am living my best life or being my best self is me. Take this explanation, from the website lifehack.org:
The definition of “best self” is subjective. Your version of your best self may not be the same as your family or close friends. …[R]emember your personal definition of your best self…Generally, your best self means taking control of your life. When you call the
shots, you become more empowered to make decisions towards your happiness.
Added to this inward focus is the notion that your best, be it self or life, is there for the taking – a goal that you can achieve, if only you try hard enough - and that once you’ve done that, happiness will be yours.
If we needed any convincing of the folly of this whole narrative, it is surely horribly present to us in Ukraine. If you, a wife and mother and businesswoman, find yourself crouched over empty glass bottles, with by your side your small child, grinding up polystyrene so that you can make Molotov cocktails, not daring to think about what you are doing, but just, moment by moment, inhabiting your newly surreal and fear-drenched existence, how exactly are you going to define your best self? Even in our daily lives, in the main, blessedly mundane by comparison, the world, and the complexity of our situations, means that the whole concept is both deluded and tyrannical: deluded, because we cannot attain it; tyrannical, because of the constant pressure to try.
This is why humanity needs the checks and balances of an arbiter beyond itself. This is why we need God. And this is why we need Ash Wednesday – and why, if we’re doing it properly, Ash Wednesday should properly shake us up.
Central to the ‘living my best life’ concept is the notion of control: my control of myself, and my control of my environment. And
perhaps it’s no accident that as these ideas have taken off, the verb ‘to curate’ has crept into our language in realms far removed from its original frame of reference in art galleries and museums. Nowadays, we are encouraged to curate everything, from our table settings to our bedlinen to our music playlists. If we’re not careful, Ash Wednesday can fall into this worldview too: it can be the gateway to a curated Lent. A Lent in which we decide what we’re going to do in order to become our best selves. What we’re going to do in order to live our best lives. And – sneakiest of all – what we’re going to do to let other people know what it is we’re doing, so that they’re aware just how hard we are focussing on being the best we can be.
This can all feel highly virtuous. And that sense of virtue is not new. The Lord, in Isaiah’s call to righteousness, challenges those who ask, ‘ “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” ’ Here we are, showing you just how much we are being our best selves. Why is it not working?
‘Is such the fast that I choose’ comes the reply. ‘A day to humble oneself?’ Your fast is inwards: controlling your own experience, performing your best-self rituals, curating your humility. My fast, says the Lord, is not about control. My fast is the opposite: it is to loose, to undo, to free, to unburden. My fast is to share, to invite, to warm, to comfort.
Your fast is control. My fast is freedom.
It is no coincidence that this passage is itself couched, not as an order, but as a questioning, a yearning, a drawing-in. Is it not to do this? asks the Lord. And to do this – to join his fast of freedom, what is needed is that his people unpick their desire to curate their own lives; that they prise their grasp from the fruitless quest for their best selves; that they live instead at God’s disposal, and learn through him what it is to be at the disposal of their sisters and brothers. To enter into this fast, we must forget ourselves, remember that we are dust, and be re-membered by the one who alone has the power to make us our best, and to judge what that best is.
The disruptive and liberating truth which we hear afresh this Lent is that in the divine economy, our best is a by-product. When we turn away from our earth-bound egocentric obsessions, when we abandon ourselves to God, then we will shine. And we will shine, not because we have sounded a trumpet or prayed ostentatiously or worn our ash with pride. We will shine, not because we think we are shining – perhaps we won’t even notice – but because we will have allowed God’s healing and vindication and glory to shine in us. We will, as God says to Adam, return to the earth. But, fragile and fallible though our bodily existence is, through it lies the treasure which is life in all its fullness.
As this evening we receive the ashen reminder of our common humanity, we weep for those, so close to us, whose lives are being brought to dust. Each one is a piece of earth, created in the image of God whose Son embodies the dust of the world. As he divests himself of all that is not love, abandoning even his earthly life, he makes real for us the treasure which is unassailable, the light which is unstoppable, and the hope which rebuilds and raises up and repairs and restores. Let this be our fast: for our lives to be joined with each other’s, and with his, in his suffering, in his death, in his freedom.
A prayer for this Ash Wednesday from the Corrymeela Community:
May we, who will return to the earth,
use these days to draw closer to you
and to all those who share
this earth, this breath,
this animating love
that can bring even ash to life.
Amen.