[Uucf-bible] Ash Wednesday/Lent Meditations

[RevRonRobinson at aol.com]

>From "For Everything There Is A Season" by Wallace W. Robbins, 1910-1988, 
first published in 1978 and republished in 1987 by the UUCF. 

During this time from Ash Wednesday, through Lent, to Palm Sunday, Maundy 
Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, we will be publishing excerpts from the 
Robbins meditation manual. The first is the following Ash Wednesday meditation, and 
next to come will be thirteen Lenten meditations in the weeks leading up to 
Holy Week. Below the meditation is a brief biography of Rev. Robbins. 

Ash Wednesday

"Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, comes upon this week, and the entire 
Western Church enters into a time of abstinence and meditation as contemporary 
Christians retrace the road of Jesus from the Mount of Transfiguration to the 
hill of execution.

"In an earlier time this vigil was for forty hours but it was finally 
extended to forty days. As the Sundays were excluded, they being always days of 
joyful worship, the beginning of Lent was set back to Wednesday to allow for the 
full forty days.

"It is noticeable that although changes have taken place in the rules 
governing the intensity of fasting and meditation and in the length of time from 
hours to days, the one consistency is in the number forty. Forty hours or forty 
days; it appears of lasting significance that it be forty. Probably this number 
was agreed upon to correspond with the number of days Jesus spent in the 
wilderness before he took up his destiny as the serving King. But these forty days 
had their prefiguration also: the days of the flood, the years of wandering in 
the wilderness, the days of Elijah's fast.

"Forty is a biblical symbol for temptation, a word considerably devalued in 
present currency to mean the allure of evil. We have come to think of that part 
of the Lord's Prayer as simply a plea that we be kept out of those situations 
which are occasions of sin. Typically, modern usage makes the situation of 
temptation an outward matter. Help man to be clear of outward conditions and you 
will have cleared his soul of inner turmoil. 

"Prohibition dealt with alcoholic abuse in this outward fashion, but, because 
of the inner compulsions of the addicted and of those rebellious against all 
authority, the situation became worse.

"The biblical "forty" stands for a different understanding of temptation. It 
is the tension which one feels in his heart when he sees that victory lies 
ahead and that safety means turning back. He may wish that the conditions which 
have brought him to this trial of soul had never come to pass, but since they 
have, the testing is not in his ability to resolve the conflict but to endure 
it and, ever in fear, to press forward. The real victory is not to be measured 
by the success of the action, but by the inner success even in the face of 
outer defeat.

"Nomadic Israel in the wilderness for forty years was not victorius in any 
achievement except that of survival as a loyal people. Neither by outer attack 
or by inner dissension could the ultimate integrity of Israel be broken and 
that inner strength was all and sufficient.

"Jesus emerged from his personal journey in the wilderness confirmed in his 
Jewish vision of what constitutes passing the test, the cleared vision of man 
as built from the inside out and not made by the laws of state, the rituals of 
religion, the allurements of pomp and circumstance.

"To reflect upon this inner meaning of nations and of men is the business of 
Lent."

---Born in New Bedford, Mass., in 1910, and educated for the ministry at 
Tufts and Meadville, Wallace Woodsome Robbins served our movement in Alton, 
Illinois, Unity Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, as president of Meadville Theological 
School and as a professor in the Federated Theological Faculty at the 
University of Chicago, and as the long-time minister of the First Unitarian Church in 
Worcester, Mass. His mission, he often said, was "to make Christians more 
liberal and liberals more Christian."


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