March 5 2025 Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday has been the beginning of the season of Lent since the 8th century when it was a confessional penance for notorious sinners to humiliate themselves with sackcloth and ash, like Job or Daniel. Thankfully these days, the most we are asked to do is ‘rethink’ what we are doing, and undergo some degree of self-examination. As we heard from Joel ‘rend your hearts, not your garments’.
One of the problems when we just focus on ‘what I give up’, or ‘what I am no longer doing’ during this season, is that we risk turning our backs on the joys of embodiment and the beauties of the earth. Our eyes are so trained on heaven, we forget we are still here on earth. Yes life is serious but is our focus on salvation just an escape from this world of perpetual dying, or can we still enjoy everlasting beauty in every passing moment. Can we be ‘citizens of heaven’ and still joyfully live here on earth.
If you ask a farmer why they prune their fruit trees, they will probably tell you ‘to let the light in’. During Lent, we prune and simplify our lives to let God’s light in. Life may be brief, and uncertain, but that should not reduce or negate our wonder, our praise, our celebration of beauty. This day, every moment, is a ‘thin place’ for God is with us, revealed in flesh, blood, and healing touch.
The words used for the imposition of ashes – remember you are dust, and unto dust you will return – reminds us that we are dust, but we are earthly dust, springing forth from a multi-billon year holy adventure. And there is nothing wrong with dust, it is the place of fruitfulness or fertility; of moist dark soil, and maybe even ‘star dust’, emerging from God’s intergalactic creativity. We may be frail, but we are also part of a holy adventure reflecting God’s love over billions of years and billions of galaxies.
Our Gospel reading highlighted three principal acts of piety – almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. But this extension of the Sermon on the Mount offers us a hint of Jesus’ humour that is often lost in translation as it ‘plays out’ the ostentatious displays of those who follow the letter of the Joel’s oracle but persist in rending their garments not their hearts.
Lent is not forty days of hunger and denial. In a Eucharistic prayer from a Roman Missal we find these words addressed to God. “Each year you give us this joyful season when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed.” Renewal and growth are what Jesus sought for his disciples, and they are fundamental to the teaching in all the readings on Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday causes us to pause, notice, wake up and discover that ‘God is in this place’. Rather than giving up or taking up something, maybe we could just take a ‘beauty break’ and open ourselves to the awe-filled, precarious world in which we live. So look and see the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, enjoy the beauty of the creeks and water ways in our neighbourhoods. Let the ash I put on you be ash of transformation, of awakening to beauty and love, of seizing the moment and living.