“Remember, O man, that dust thou art”
We begin in ashes. We call this day Ash Wednesday for while we are reminded that we are but dust, it is ashes which are placed on our foreheads on this day. The dust recalls us to our origins. We are the dust into which God has breathed his life-giving spirit. But the greater emphasis of this day lies in the ashes, as it were, and not in the dust. The ashes are the ashes of repentance.
The ashes are made from burning last year’s palm crosses. “Fire ever doth aspire,/And makes all like itself, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes” the poet John Donne puts it in a poem celebrating love, actually a marriage. As he suggests, love is unlike fire that ends in ashes; there is something more. “Love’s strong arts” make one, create unity and life, where before there was division and separation and death. All love in the Christian understanding of things finds its ultimate meaning in the love of God.
The ashes of Ash Wednesday mark not an ending but a new beginning, a renewal in love. Lent is the pilgrimage of love. That pilgrimage is a renewal and a perfecting in love. That love is the perfecting grace of Christ, the divine love incarnate who goes the way of our imperfect loves to make perfect our loves. There must be in us the continual purgation and purification of our loves. They are purged and purified in the passion of Christ, in the pilgrimage of his perfect love for us. That is the intent of Lent and the significance of beginning in ashes. It is wanted that that perfect love should move in us. Our loves are to undergo a purgation and a purification through “Love divine, all loves excelling.”
We are called to repentance. There is to be in us the awareness of our imperfect loves. But the ashes do not mark an ending but a beginning again with a twofold emphasis. There is conversion from sin and there is contrition for sin. Fire ends in ashes but love – God’s love in us – is the greater fire which makes something even out of the ashes of our lives. The ashes of repentance are about divine love stirring up our hearts and minds, stirring up our souls and bodies to return again to him from whom we have turned away. We are to arise from the ashes in the renewal of faith, hope and love.
There is more here than just the cycle of the year from Palm Sunday to Ash Wednesday and so to begin again. There is more here than just the recycling of Palm crosses to become the ashes of Ash Wednesday. No. There is a greater circling, a deepening of the understanding that is looked for in the coming around yet again to Ash Wednesday and Lent.
“Repentance itself”, says Lancelot Andrewes, “is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’, to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away.” To return is to turn away from sin, from all that separates us from God and from one another. To return to him in repentance is to be sorrowful for our sins which have placed us at enmity with God and at war with one another. Lent reminds us “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” as the Penitential Service puts it (BCP, p. 614).
There is in this conversion from sin and contrition for sin a deeper glory. There is the joy of renewing love. There is the joy of knowing that we have a gracious God to whom we may return yet again. There is the joy of knowing that repentance is the gracious stirring of his love in us recalling us to the truth of ourselves as found in him.
The ashes are placed on our foreheads signifying at once the rational faculty by which we are made in God’s image and the misuse of that divine image in us by our willful disobedience. The ashes are placed on our foreheads with the words that recall at once our origins – we are but dust – but also our end, that we are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit, dust which he raises up, dust imbued with heavenly purpose, dust dignified with divinity. The ashes are placed with the sign of the cross. Out of the ashes of our disordered loves comes the redemption of our loves, our beginning again in him in whom we have our life and being, now and always.
Lent is the season of renewal in love. We are recalled to him who made us and who redeems us. To remember that and to act upon that remembrance is to be renewed in love. The fire of Christ’s love is “that most burning love for the crucified”(Bonaventure) in us. It does not end in ashes.
“Remember, O man, that dust thou art.”
In the name of the Church, I bid you to the observance of an holy Lent.
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday
Christ Church 2016