Today is Ash Wednesday.
As most of you know – by virtue of the fact that you are here – Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent, which is a forty day period that will lead us into the remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday and the celebration of his resurrection on Easter morning.
The season of Lent is meant to be a time of serious reflection, which in some traditions includes periods of fasting and prayer. This call to Lenten self-reflection, to self-denial and to repentance is meant to help us to focus our minds, our hearts and our spirits on the sin that exercises such power in our lives, on the cost that such brokenness and failure exacts on this beloved world, and on the terrible consequence of our sin, our brokenness, our failure, borne by Christ himself on the cross of Calvary.
One of the longstanding traditions of Ash Wednesday is the marking of our physical bodies with the sign of ashes, which in the biblical tradition was often a sign of grief, but also serves as a powerful reminder of both the origin and the destiny of our mortal, physical bodies.
The traditional words that are often used when the ashes are marked on people’s foreheads are these — “remember, O mortal, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Remember, O mortal, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Far from being some morbid declaration, this is actually a fairly good description of the nature of our lives. The atoms and molecules that make up our bodies are, in fact, drawn from and formed from the dust of the earth itself – the water that we drink, the food that we ingest, the air that we breathe, these elemental realities that, when taken into our bodies, serve to form and reform the cells of our bodies on a moment-by-moment and day-by-day basis.
And, as we all know (though few of us like to really think about it!), there shall come a day when the breath that is within us will cease, when we shall eat and drink no more, when we shall no longer draw into our bodies the elements that nourish and sustain us, and when these mortal bodies will, indeed, return to the earth from which they came.
But.
But for now, we are alive.
And being alive is not easy – it is difficult, it is a challenge, it is not all goodness and sweetness and light, it demands struggle and strength, it moves us through times of great sorrow, and sadness, and exhaustion, and anxiety and pain, it exposes us to a world that is filled with conflict and with brokenness.
Today’s suggested reading from Isaiah is only one of the many biblical passages that remind us of those challenges in no uncertain terms – that we live in a world of violence, of conflict, of injustice, of oppression, of homelessness, of extreme poverty, of deprivation, of animosity, of affliction. This is the world in which Isaiah lived, and this is the world in which we live.
The prophet Isaiah knew that the practices of the spiritual life could be used to blind the faithful from these realities of the world – that people could fast and perform elaborate religious rituals, they could set aside special holidays and festivals that were supposed to be about renewing their relationship with God, and make themselves feel good and faithful and holy, all the while neglecting to realize that what God desired was not simpy the elaborate rituals, but lives that were transformed by them, lives that were lived differently – lives that were dedicated to loosing the bonds of injustice, liberating the oppressed, sharing food with the hungry, extending hospitality to those in need, ending lives consumed with accusation and finger-pointing, seeking reconciliation with those with whom estrangements and resentments had grown.
In short, Isaiah was suggesting that God’s desire was that the faithful be aware of the challenging realities of this world in which we live, but rather than perpetuating the brokenness, or wallowing in it, to live in a way that showed that life could be lived differently, that life could be lived well, that the world could be transformed.
Which means that this invitation to be conscious of our mortality; to remember where we came from and where we are going; to reflect not only upon how we are living, but also to accept responsibility for the mistakes that we have made and the sins that we have committed – while such invitations can seem rather morbid and grim, they can, in fact, be tremendously inspiring.
And the reason why they can be inspiring is that they call us back to life, they remind us, perhaps they re-invite us – to accept and embrace responsibility for how we are living our lives, and how our lives can, indeed, reshape the world around us.
What happens to all of us, instead, is that we typically stumble through our days without a great deal of thought or intentionality or, for that matter, much of a sense of responsibility for our lives. We have our routines, our habits both good and bad, our commitments, our interests, our priorities. There can be monotony and tedium to the day-to-day activities of our lives, and the days can sometimes seem long. We have our patterns, we go through the motions, but our lives are what they are, the world is what it is, and there is very little that we can do about it.
So perhaps this is a part of the Lenten journey, this journey that starts today, with this opportunity to pause, for a moment, and ponder life. To ponder life, to reflect on our journey, to take stock of our lives, to accept the profound, and sacred and daunting responsibility for the lives that we are living and – hopefully – to turn ourselves around a bit, to experience what the Bible calls “metanoia” and what most English translations render as “repentance”.
Our reading from the Gospel reminds us that this turning towards God, this metanoia, this repentant acceptance of responsibility for our lives and for our place in the world were not meant to simply be marked by public and external demonstrations of our humility and piety. Jesus did not want his followers to parade around in order to call attention to their piety, any more than Isaiah did. But neither were true repentance, true turning around, true acceptance of responsibility for life and for the world meant to simply lead to some form of grovelling or self-flagellation about what terrible, depraved, sinful beings we are – which we certainly are. An honest assessment of ourselves cannot help but remind us that none of us are capable of doing much, if anything, that is done from absolutely pure and clear motivations. We are not entirely loving, we are not entirely kind, we are not entirely holy, we are not entirely just, we are not entirely noble, we are not entirely selfless, we are not entirely compassionate – and those who try to pretend that they are reveal themselves to be the greatest fools of all.
But this acknowledgement of our sinfulness – however contrite we might be – or the public parading of our oh-so-contrite ways without true inner transformation — is an acknowledgement that does very little good for anyone or anything.
What is infinitely more important is what we do after acknowledging our inadequacies, our failures, our sins. What is infinitely more important than pondering our lives and realizing that some mistakes have been – and are being – made along the way is to ask the next question – so what do we do now? What is the “next step” that we take, what are the new directions that we set out upon after having pondered our lives, realized our flaws, and accepted the beautiful, transforming responsibility to live life differently?
To ask ourselves such questions can change us, from the inside out. And perhaps this can be, and should be, at the heart of our Lenten reflections.
What is important to us? What should be important to us? In what ways are we failing to live into the fullness of what it might mean to be a conscious, living being created in love, for love, with the capacity to love? In light of our impending mortality, our inescapable finitude, our declining number of days, how do we want to live out the rest of our days in this world, however many they might be? What should be the focus of our days, the point of our existence, the priorities by which we live?
And the stunning, shocking good news that this Lenten journey beckons us to realize is that, ultimately, the brokenness of the world, the brokenness of our lives, can be, and even has been, overcome. Jesus did not come into the world to tell us that the world was just wonderful as it was, or that our lives were pure and perfect. He came to challenge us, to invite us to bear this cross of responsibility, to follow him into the brokenness in order to transform it, to accept that he walked into the place of death itself before us, calling us to follow him – but not out of some self-destructive, nihilistic, despairing pessimism – rather, to follow him, and to obey his commands, in the knowledge that his love, his light, his power could not be overcome.
So as we begin this Lenten journey, as we ponder our lives, as we take up the mantle of responsibility for how we shall live, let us do so with the courage to realize that we are alive; that our lives can be lived well; that repentance is only meant to be prelude to transformation, and that our lives can, in turn, contribute to the transformation of this world; and that the One who is light, who is love, and in whom and through all life came into being, sends us into this world to do his work, to follow him, to journey with him into the realities of a broken world, into suffering, into death; and to make this journey with him so that we will be truly prepared to realize the enormity, the wonder, the power and the joy of an empty tomb.
