When I was a kid, we liked to hurl insults at one
another. There were some classic lines, like, “Is that your head or is your
neck blowing bubbles?” Or, “Do that trick again, open your mouth and make your
face disappear!”One of my favorites was always, “Halloween’s over; you can take
off your mask!” Well, that actually is what Ash Wednesday is all about for us
as Christians. Mardi Gras is over, you can take off your mask.
Mardi Gras, which literally means Fat Tuesday in
French, is one last day of revelry before the solemn season of Lent begins. One
of the traditions of Mardi Gras is wearing masks. It’s not just a fun thing to
do, but it actually has some significance. For this day, Ash Wednesday, the day
when Lent begins, is the day when we remove our masks.
Back in ancient Greece, when they had plays, the
actors wore very large masks to portray their characters. That way, even in an
enormous Greek amphitheatre, people could see the facial expressions of the
actors. The theatrical mask was called a persona.
It’s a word that has been adopted in modern psychology to refer to the self
that we present to the world around us. Our persona is our psychological
clothing. Carl Jung said that “the persona is that which in reality one is not,
but which oneself as well as others think one is.” It’s a mask that we can hide behind.
We all wear these masks. In many ways they’re
useful. They can define the role we fill in the world around us and help us
feel comfortable with one another. I spend a lot of time wearing the mask of a
pastor. That’s the persona I present in order to perform a function. It
wouldn’t be helpful for me to wear the mask of a computer geek or a politician or
a basketball player when the people in my congregation need me to play the part
of the pastor.
Sometimes we also wear masks to protect ourselves
from being too vulnerable to others. That’s not such a bad thing either. We all
learn what we need to do to protect ourselves in life, and that includes knowing
the appropriate masks we need to wear in different settings.
But our masks become a problem for us when we use
them to hide who we really are from others so that no one ever really gets to
know us. Our masks become an even bigger problem for us when we use them to
hide the truth about who we really are from ourselves. And, our masks become
the biggest problem of all when we use them in an attempt to hide who we really
are before God.
The truth is, despite our best efforts to hide
behind the masks we wear, God knows who we really are. The point of Lent is to
return to the relationship we have with God. The first step on our Lenten
journey involves removing our masks so that we can be honest about who we are.
Tonight Christians all over the world will go home and look in the mirror to
see a reminder that we are mortal, that our time on this earth is limited and
that our life belongs to God. Our masks will be gone and on our foreheads we’ll
see an ashen cross.
The life of faith is not about the masks we wear
that make us look like good, moral people. The life of faith is about the
relationship we have with God, and that relationship doesn’t stand a chance
unless it’s honest.
So many of us miss this. We tend to focus on Lent
as a time to clean up our act and we’ll engage in pious activities like fasting
and good old fashioned groveling in confession for our sins. Those aren’t bad
things to do, but they don’t necessarily lead us to a more authentic
relationship with God. In fact, they can actually become yet another mask that
we use to hide behind. For as long as we approach Lent with our agendas, we’re presenting
a false self to God. We’re filling a role that we have created to God and we’re
not the authentic people God has created us to be. We’ve become the religious
person praying on the street corner when God longs to meet the person we are in
the privacy of our room with the door shut, in secret.
So, how do we do
that? How do we remove the masks we hide behind so we can have an authentic
relationship with God? We won’t get there by directing how our relationship
with God will go. We can’t make it happen by talking to God or searching for
God. We can only meet God by getting our persona out of the way. It happens in
moments when we’re open, undefended and immediately present.
God isn’t a
commodity we can control. We can’t tell God what to do or invite God to be a
part of our life. Because God is already present. Richard Rohr has said: “God’s
Spirit is dwelling within you. You cannot search for what you already have. You
cannot talk God into ‘coming’ into you by longer and more urgent prayers. All
you can do is become quieter, smaller, and less filled with your own self and
its flurry of ideas and feelings. Then God will be obvious in the very now of things.”
The practice of Centering
Prayer is a way of finding silence and solitude where you can move away from
the busyness of your life and focus on what really matters. Again, Father Rohr
says, “authentic religion is more about subtraction than addition, more letting
go of the false self than any attempt at engineering a true self. You can’t
create what you already have.”
It can be scary to stand before God, stripped of
all pretenses. But it’s the only way to a genuine relationship with him. God
doesn’t want our religiosity, God wants our authenticity. As Psalm 51 reminds
us, “God takes no delight in burnt offerings. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart
God will not despise.”
So, are you ready to get serious about your
relationship with God? Are you ready to stop controlling that relationship by
insisting on your own spiritual agenda? Are you ready to remove the mask of the
false self you wear to keep your distance from God so you can open yourself up
to an honest relationship with the one who knows you better than you know
yourself? It’s time to stop pretending. It’s time to get real.
