Ash Wednesday, the agitated God

"On this Ash Wednesday, how can we not lament? What other godly way is there? The Ghanaian Methodist theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye speaks of God being agitated. This agitation – described in kindred words in many biblical texts – is both compassion and distress. Most of all, Oduyoye writes, God is agitated at suffering and injustice.

God is agitated, friends. God is appalled. God weeps. And God the Lover longs for us to return Godward, with tears.
...It happens sometimes without our noticing: We have become numb to suffering, habituated to the sly creep of resignation, inured to the ways the powers and principalities exercise their insidious reign. Then, on this day of ashes, the trumpet blows and we leave numbness behind. It is not something we do alone. Part of the power of the day is the witness of its collective, public lament.

Many of us are reluctant to lament in public and to do so with the force of religious language. To do so with specificity, naming the causes of our lament – intimate and personal but more often social, economic, local, regional, planetary, political – is especially difficult. Personal inhibition, perhaps – we are not just numb to others' grief but sometimes to our own. Or perhaps we and our religion are too polite. Or we have bad memories of Christians being offensively public (like the hypocrites of Matthew's Gospel) or of Christians calling for repentance in ways that deny the holiness of the body and of sexual desire.

Or perhaps we have fallen prey to the privatizing of religion. Here in the U.S., there is not as much distance as it appears between “Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior” and the feel-good spirituality of those who abhor this kind of language and have left Christianity behind. Both are personal and only personal. But Christian faith is not only trust in Christ to cherish and make whole our individual lives; it is proclamation of Christ as "savior of the world."

To this savior of the world we turn our hearts and our actions, together. This is not a convert-making feast, leading others into the fold. It is the feast of our own family attending to the state of its own house. Ashes on our foreheads, we lament the state of earth and its inhabitants, its wounds and cries, and the silence and dust of death. In repentance, we lament our own complicity in the inflicting of earth's wounds, our standing by when earth and its creatures were wounded, all the times we have distanced ourselves from others who like us are made of earth and with whom we will share on this earth the same dusty end.
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http://www.thewitness.org/agw/redmont020405.html