“This body is junk,” my mother said, a couple of hours before she died. It was June 21, 1996. She was surrounded by her seven children, called to her bedside for her last words. I was nearly 26 years old, half my lifetime ago.
“This body is junk,” she said. I flatly disagree with her assessment, and I would love, one day, beyond this life, to challenge her on this point, and say, “No, Mother, all bodies are holy. God does not make junk.” But I must remember that she had endured tremendous hardship in her body, for practically her whole life, so her frustration with physical existence was reasonable and understandable. She suffered a bad case of polio at the age of ten, and then decades of severe post-polio syndrome, and probably psoriatic arthritis. At one point she was bent over nearly ninety degrees. She endured four literally back-breaking years of surgeries in which surgeons installed metal rods in her spine, and she wore neck-to-hip body casts through those years, even in the muggy Minnesota months of summer. Three times they removed the cast and said, “It didn’t work; we need to do this again.” In midlife, she could walk and work; she even had her seventh baby after all that surgery! But ovarian cancer ended her life a few weeks before her 59th birthday. All of this is to say, she has every right to proclaim, “This body is junk.”
But that wasn’t all she said, shortly before her death. She said, “This body is junk, but it produced seven perfect children.”
Now, that is lovely. I can (and I sometimes do) simply bask in its beauty: I hear the love, and I feel it. But I may want to push back a little on this point as well, after I find her on the other shore, and we catch up. “Perfect?” I may say. “I think I can introduce you to a great crowd of people who can spot my many imperfections. Just ask the staff at Grace Church how much fun I am on Tuesdays at 2:00pm, post sugar crash.”
But I think my mother was simply being an astute theologian. She knew that “Perfect” does not mean flawless. And maybe the junk line about her own body was said with irony: I am confident that my mother knew that she, too, was—and still is—a beloved, perfect child of God.
“Perfect”: a word from the Latin per fecare, meaning not that one is flawless, or that one does something flawlessly, but that one is thorough, that one does something thoroughly. We were perfect children in my mother’s eyes because she saw readily that there is nothing wrong with us—not in our essence. In our essence, we are—all of us—thoroughly good. “Very good,” God says, in Genesis chapter one. Now, everyone in the world fights and quarrels; we waste the blessings of the earth; we say and do things we regret; we are fallible, mortal humans, often absurd, sometimes nasty, sometimes cruel, sometimes pathological. Me at my worst: it’s not pretty. But we are all, each one of us, perfect in God’s sight—in our essence. God can see through our bullshit, our foolishness, our selfishness, our meanness and small-minded mulish awfulness. God sees right through all that and knows and loves us as the wondrous creatures whom God lovingly and delightfully made.
And that’s why God calls us here on Ash Wednesday, the strange day when we have our foreheads smeared with greasy ashes to remind us that one day our bodies will be cadavers, and the day when we spill the tea, all of it: we come clean about everything. All of our screwups. All of our wretched behaviors. All of our baggage. We get it all out there, and give thanks once again that God puts it all away. We are forgiven. The Power of Sin is routed. Even the Power of Death is defeated! Death and Sin, the two Powers of the evil one, are defeated at the Cross, and brushed away like so much lint when the tomb bursts open with Resurrection life. On Ash Wednesday we look closely at all this, but this deep grace of God works on and through us every day of the year, every day of our lives.
We are made new. Our true selves can be seen, unencumbered by all that dreck. And our true selves, God’s works of art—they gleam with glory.
But year by year, we come back to all this on Ash Wednesday. Year by year, we trudge through it all, because year by year we lose sight of our essential goodness, and we need God’s grace to glimpse it anew. Blaise Pascal reflected on the human being, and all of our tragicomic contradictions. He wrote, “What sort of freak then is [the human being]! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!” We humans! We mess up this world in so many ways. We tear it apart in chosen wars, like the atrocity of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We spoil the seas and foul the air. We fail to notice, let alone care about, the suffering of millions. We give up easily. We hide behind privilege. We forget.
And yet, and yet, though God definitely sees and works with all of that, God sees and knows our essential goodness. And that essential goodness of the human being is the reason why we confess our sins in the first place: God doesn’t redeem junk. God doesn’t forgive garbage. And junk doesn’t own up to anything. Garbage doesn’t say, “I’m sorry, and I want to make a repair.” Our best and truest selves do that holy work, by God’s power and with God’s help.
One author in the field of couples therapy says it this way: “Only the best in us can talk about the worst in us, because the worst in us denies its own existence.”
And so this hard and odd and bracing day is also a joyful day, a robustly good and glad holiday. I like to call Ash Wednesday “Laundry Day.” It’s the day when we pull out all of our dirty laundry, and God helps us wash it. Do not be afraid: our laundry is dirty, not our souls. All of this work is good work, done by essentially good people, beloved by God.
Finally, then, my dearly departed mother was wrong: her body was not junk. St. Francis could help her with this. He called his body “Brother Ass,” a donkey, a beast of burden, and he submitted his poor body to years of malnutrition and corporal punishment. But toward the end of his life, Francis asked his own body for forgiveness. Before the end, Francis learned to look upon both his body and soul the way God does.
You are perfect. Your fallible and mortal body is perfect. God lovingly made you, and looks upon you with delight. You are essentially good, made to do good things, created to love, empowered to serve, free and lovely and filled with God’s glory. I am, too. The people we don’t like, the people we don’t care about, the people who disgust or enrage us: they, too, are good in their essence, thoroughly good. So let us now, without fear, open our canvas bags, full of dirty laundry.
Our good souls will love to take all of it back up, clean and warm, and fold it, and put it away. May this deep and cleansing grace of God be a sharp yet tender mercy for you, on this good and odd Wednesday, as the long Winter slowly, very slowly, bows to the healing warmth of Spring.
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Preached on Ash Wednesday, March 2, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Psalm 103:8-14
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
Artwork: photo by Ronda Broatch, a member of Grace Episcopal Church.
The couples-therapy author quoted in the text is David Schnarch, who wrote Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships.