“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
Dust and ashes. Hardly an auspicious beginning, we might think. Usually we think of dust and ashes in terms of endings; the fire that ends in a heap of ashes, the dust that is swirls around in the wind, the detritus of the mundane world.
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Dust and ashes are the dominant images of the day. Ashes are a symbol of repentance in the ancient biblical culture. Dust recalls us to the biblical story of creation and is the strong image of our creatureliness. Everything in the physical and material universe is made of dust, we might say. That is an important feature of our creation: we are the God-made dust into which God has breathed his spirit, even sanctified dust.
The two images coalesce in the ritual imposition of ashes on our foreheads, itself another image that signals the special nature of our creatureliness. We are made in the image of God by virtue of our reason and will symbolized in our foreheads. Ashes are imposed with the sign of the cross on our foreheads, and they are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” Those words, too, suggest an ending. They seem to sound an ominous and serious note.
And yet, the business of this day is all about a beginning and as such there is something lovely and wonderful, even beautiful about Ash Wednesday. It is, we might say, a somber day of the soul’s rejoicing. Why? Because the operative word and idea of Ash Wednesday is repentance and repentance is great good news for our souls. We get to begin again.
Repentance is about the renewal of love. That can only happen through a kind of self-awareness that is equally about an openness to God. Socrates, Plato tells us, taught that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Ignorance is not bliss; it isn’t even life. A kind of exhortation to thinking critically and philosophically, we might say that the Christian take on this ancient Greek maxim is that “the unrepentant life is not worth saving.”
Salvation comes about through our awareness of our faults and failings. To be aware of such things, whether in a general or specific sense, is to be aware of a truth that is greater than us and yet is true for us. To say we have sinned is to confess the divine order of truth against which we have sinned. And sin is not simply about making mistakes. No. Sin is about doing or not doing what we know we should or should not do. I would add, at least to some extent or another. At least to some extent or another, there is the issue of intentionality, the issue of our freedom and responsibility.
Without that concept there can be no sin and no repentance and no salvation. There would be only the bleak fatalism of an empty world and the terrifying reality of our empty souls. To confess our sins is to confess God. There is a beginning. There is a journey, the journey of the soul into God, to use Bonaventure’s phrase.
Every confession of sin is a confession of the praise of God. There is a joy in repentance for the simple reason that we look back to God and because in so doing we enter into what God wants for us, which is not guilt and remorse, not recriminations and accusations either of ourselves or others, but the desire and wish for renewal and restoration.
The words of the miserere mei capture the meaning of this beginning. “Make me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me.” It is the strong cry of the heart to God. It is a new beginning, a beginning in dust and ashes that looks to the redemption of our humanity, to the renewal of the divine love in us. The soul, as the poet Dante puts it, is made apt for worship, for the love of God in whom all loves find their truth and meaning. To enter into this beginning is to discover the divine love that makes all things lovely, even you and even me.
“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Ash Wednesday, March 9th, 2011