by CCW | 14 February 2024 14:00
The Ash Wednesday words at the Imposition of Ashes echo God’s words to us in the Genesis story of the Fall. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” These words belong to our being called to account by God for our sin and disobedience, our separation from God and from one another. Lent begins in dust and ashes. We begin with the remembrance of the Fall but is that our end?
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” but only so as to be raised up. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. It symbolizes our lives in faith with God. Such is the journey of Lent. The American version of the children’s rhyme, Ring around the Rosie, is probably an echo of the devastating effects of the plague in 1665 in England, transformed centuries later into a light-hearted children’s game. Yet it reminds us of serious things.
Today, in a wonderful paradox of Providence, is both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. “It’s all about love” (Bruce Cockburn), the divine love which seeks the redemption and perfection of our humanity. We begin the pilgrimage of love with the ritual of the Imposition of Ashes upon our foreheads with the sign of the Cross and with the words, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We are recalled to our origins in creation as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit but as well of the consequences of our falling away through our sin and disobedience; the awareness of separation, of sin, suffering, and death. Hence the significance of the ashes. They are a biblical symbol for repentance, our recognition of having turned away from God’s Word and Will yet desiring to be turned back to God. Lent is about taking our lives as spiritual beings seriously through “self-examination, and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.”
Such disciplines belong to the pilgrimage of love. It is a question about what really matters, about where our hearts are. It is a question about our spiritual priorities: will it be with the passing things of the world or will it be with the eternal things of God? Lent is a call to maturity and seriousness about our “words, thoughts and deeds;” in short our lives spiritually which inform all that we do. The pilgrimage of love is about attending to the motions of God’s love made visible on the Cross and the idea of our participation in Christ’s sacrificial love. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” God seeks our hearts in his all-sufficient love seen through the breaking open of the heart of God in Christ’s Passion. “The sacrifices of God,” as the Psalmist tells us, “are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” In every way, God calls us home to himself in his eternal love. It is his love we seek, the love that raises us up.
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” as John Donne puts it in an extravagant and moving poem, “for, you/As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.” God has to break us to make us, it seems, and all by moving our hearts and minds; only so may we rise and stand. “Knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend,” are gentle images that stand in stark contrast to the strong (and violent) verbs and images of “batter, break, blow, burn.” Such is the challenge of Lent. A time for serious thought and discipline about the radical meaning of our being embraced in the love of God accomplished in the sacrifice of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday 2024
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