Ash Wednesday’s clear message is one of invitation to enter forty days of prayer, penance and almsgiving in preparation for our greatest feast day, Easter! In the early Church these forty days were a time of retreat for those about to be baptised.
What is it about Ash Wednesday that holds universal appeal, almost as if this day suggests there is something written into our DNA!
The season of Lent begins with ashes on our foreheads. It seems our heart understands this ritual more than our head as evidenced by huge numbers of people who attend church on this day. Why are ashes so popular?
Let us focus on three aspects of Ash Wednesday.
As a symbol, ashes are blunt and primal; they speak the language of the soul: ‘Remember you are dust and unto dust you will return!’ We know instinctively why we take the ashes and it is no accident that ashes have been a major symbol in most religions.
To put on ashes recognises we are in a reflective, penitential mode; no longer are we in ordinary time but we are becoming attentive to important work going on silently within us. Every so often, then, we need to make this journey, be marked with ashes, lose our lustre and wait for ashes to do their work.
I recall that centuries old wisdom tale, the story of Cinderella that speaks about the value of ashes. The very name, Cinderella, already speaks most of it: a young girl sitting in the cinders.
Before the glass slipper is placed on her foot, before she gets to put on the royal clothes, go to the ball, and dance with the prince it is necessary to spend time sitting in the ashes, tasting some emptiness, feeling some powerlessness, and trusting that all of this is necessary to help bring about the maturity needed to do the royal dance. In the story of Cinderella there is a theology of Lent.
Not surprisingly, then, the church taps into this well of wisdom when it signs our foreheads with ashes at the beginning of Lent. This is the season for us to sit in the ashes, to spend time, like Cinderella, working and sitting in the cinders of fire, grieving our wrongdoings, renouncing the dance, refraining from the banquet, refusing to do business as usual, waiting while silent growth takes place within us, simply being still so that the ashes can do their work in us.
The ritual, marked by ashes, seeks our response: when are we most willing to let God into our lives? Often, it is when we are most vulnerable; when we are able admit our inadequacy in “standing alone.” Ash Wednesday’s ashes provide the beginning of an ideal time to remember that we, in a truly profound manner, need to learn our total dependence on God.
There is another aspect to Ash Wednesday’s ritual. A recent conversation brought this home to me. Our Lenten journey commences with an unusual anointing. On Ash Wednesday we enter our churches in quiet reflection and exit with a death mark on our foreheads, ashes applied in the shape of a cross with the accompanying words inviting us to “turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel.” Two deaths are highlighted – the death of Jesus and our death.
Ash Wednesday, in a myriad of ways, using images and symbols, encourages us to ponder what it means to share Christ’s life through our baptism. The Scriptures, this day and every day of Lent, seek to shape us and conform us more closely to the Risen Christ so that at the culmination of these days, in the great feast of Easter, we may rise again from ashes knowing, as St Paul says, ‘it is no longer I that lives, it is Christ who lives in me.’
The daily death of self – giving over all those parts of our being that are resisting God – that we attend to with renewed vigour over the coming forty days. There is the future death of our physical body – “remember you are dust…” – yet our hope is for growth in new life with Christ.
We are reminded in the Gospel of another anointing, one prior to Christ’s death, and Jesus telling his disciples it is a preparation for burial. Many around him were unable to understand this action, even ridiculed it.
A rich image portrayed by the Gospel is that of the desert where Jesus went freely to fast and pray. For forty days and nights he ate nothing but, as Ronald Rolheiser suggests, Jesus deprived himself of all physical supports (including food, water, enjoyments, and distractions) that protected him from feeling, from his vulnerability, his dependence and the need to surrender in deep trust to God. Yes, he was hungry and vulnerable to temptation from the devil but he was more open to God.
The desert, while taking away the securities and protections of ordinary life, strips us bare and leaves us naked before God and the devil. Thus we are brought face to face with our own chaos.
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