Readings for the Ash Wednesday Reflection:
Joel 2: 12–18
2 Corinthians 5:20–6:2
Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18
What are we to make of this whole business of ashes?
In the gospel reading, Jesus very clearly says that it is only hypocrites who change the appearance of their faces; that when we fast, we are to wash our faces, groom our hair, and avoid looking glum.
And yet, Catholics and many other Christians flock to church today, more than on many a Sunday, because they want to have ashes placed on their foreheads. What to make of these ashes? They are insubstantial dust that can be easily blown away.
So how should we feel about about this smudging of our foreheads and the Lent that follows? Proud that we wear an external insignia of belonging to our religious tribe? That is how many of us growing up before Vatican II thought about wearing our ashes as we walked about our neighborhoods. It was similar to making a bit of a show about eating our tuna salad sandwiches and avoiding meat on Fridays, a way of claiming our Catholic identity.
But if the point is not really prideful showing off, what is the point? And what should we do as this season of Lent begins? Give up candy? Swear off the booze? Turn away from whatever guilty pleasure we enjoy? Should we look upon Lent as simply a second chance to renew our broken New Year’s resolutions?
Let me suggest that, unsurprisingly, none of that gets us to the heart of the matter. Lent is not some sort of religious boot camp, a six-week self-improvement program of spiritual gymnastics. In fact, self-improvement may be one of the things we need to avoid, with its subtle temptation to take pride in our “growth” and the mistake of relying on what we will do by our own efforts. The last thing Lent should encourage is that we be focused on ourselves—our efforts, our successes at self-improvement.
Whatever good intention may lie behind them, the key questions are not, what should I do for Lent? Or what should I give up?
Rather, our fasting, prayer, and acts of charity are meant to focus our hearts on two vital questions: Who am I? Who do I say that Jesus is?
The ashes give us one answer to the who am I question. Perhaps we begin Lent with ashes to remind us that we must confront the earthly reality of our dust so that we will appreciate the God-given grace of our salvation. I am insubstantial dust and yet loved beyond all measure by a gracious Creator.
The ashes remind us that we are bits of earth, brought to life by God’s life in us. As Genesis says: The Lord God shaped a human being from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so that he became a living creature. Does this show our God disdaining dust? Hardly! Dust is the work of his hands. Insubstantial as it is, it is now so much more than the nothingness from which he made it. From lowly dust, God fashioned us, you and me, in the divine image.
Human sin, pride, and self-centeredness resulted in a death in which our bodies revert to earthly dust, perhaps in a way that God had not originally intended. But God did not turn away in frustration or anger at our creaturely flaws. In Jesus, God embraced human imperfection in a whole new way—God took on our flesh and dwelt among us.
In ancient Palestine, Jesus walked on dust, washed it from his disciples’ feet, stumbled and fell on it, sweated and bled into it. And in doing all that, God once again made dust from nothing into something; from inconsequential dirt into the stuff of which the children of God are made, once again destined to share eternal glory.
No, it is not God who disdains dust. We do. And there’s the sin. Like Adam and Eve before us, we try to escape our origins, we forget who and what we are. We try to flee from our dependency, our moment-to-moment frailty and vulnerability, from the basic truth that every breath we take is ours only because God gives it. We forget the dignity of “dust-ness,” the beauty of being God’s creation.
Here in the early years of the 21st century, our affluence and leisure offer us many more options for escaping or forgetting our true human condition. Yet, the multitude of satisfactions offered up to us in our culture do not take away the insistent hunger in our hearts; for once we have this, then we want that. All the things we buy and consume will pass away, but the hole in our heart remains.
Lent is an invitation to hold on long enough that we come to see once again the simple truth of our existence, to bracket the noise and distractions so that we can face the truth that St. Augustine learned slowly and painfully: Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, O Lord.
Remember, at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno we don’t find lust, or even hate. Those things are at least passionate. Instead we find cold indifference. Ashes grown cold, the divine spark of love extinguished.
The bottom line is that when we sin we forget or deny who we are: God-touched, redeemed dust. Hence, today’s ashes. Think of Lent as a time for re-earthing, re-grounding ourselves. For facing our creatureliness and for finding hope not disappointment in that reality. Because our faith tells us that only by following Jesus down into the dusty earth of the tomb, can we also follow him into risen life.
That is why it is wrong-headed, maybe even dangerous, to approach Lent solely as some sort of personal renewal project, a personal spiritual makeover. True conversion is not about self-control but our self-surrender, our self-abandonment. Changes in our self-perception take place slowly, as we learn to look to God and trust that what was done for Jesus will be done for us, his disciples.
So we gather today as fallen disciples on the doorstep of Lent. We allow our foreheads to be signed again with the cross. And perhaps we will have the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist to give thanks for who we are. We will take dust ground from grains of wheat, mixed by human hands with a little water, baked over glowing ashes by a fire, and we will allow the Holy Spirit to transform that into the real presence of Christ.
We will once again feed on Christ’s body, under the appearance of dust, believing it can and will transform our dust, infusing us with new life and meaning and hope.
Remember today that you and I are dust—and to dust we will return. Not a cause for despair but for gratitude at what God has done and will do with our human condition.