To become better and more acceptable to God and to fellow human beings
Day of choice: Ash Wednesday is a day of choice: It is a choice between me or others or God. It would be easier to answer me or God, for we would say: All for God. In the Jesuit spirit we would say: All for the greater glory of God. But if we ask me or others, it becomes a bit complex and we hesitate to answer. When we celebrate Ash Wednesday and when we put on the ash on our forehead one thing strikes: either the loss of diversity or the strength of unity – And both are the same. Ash is ash – We cannot distinguish that this pinch of ash came from this place or that atom of carbon came from this source. All have been reduced to the same ash. But it is, at the same time, a celebration of life and glory. This ash reminds us that we shall be restored to our original glory with God. So Ash Wednesday is not a day to be sad, with fast and penance, but it is a day when we are filled with hope and anticipation of glory – Ash Wednesday begins the journey towards the Garden of Gethsemane and further on to the Mount Calvary but ends up in the resurrection. We also learn that this needs a bit of waiting and patience.
In the Book of Daniel we read: “I turned to the Lord and pleaded with him in prayer and petition, in fasting, and in sackcloth and ashes” (Dan 9:3). This might be the first indication of ash related to penance in the Bible. Actually, Ash Wednesday practice was likely from the 11th Century. Up to the fourth century, candidates who prepared themselves for baptism did penance for forty days, in remembrance of our Lord spending 40 days in prayer and penance in the desert soon after his baptism. As a sign of their penitence, they wore sackcloth and were sprinkled with ashes. From the 11th century the present practice of imposition of ashes on the forehead came to be in practice.
The religious significance of ashes is multifaceted:
- Ash signifies reality: All living beings, whether plant or animals or human beings could be chemically labelled as hydrocarbons – We are made of hydrogen and carbon: 9.5% hydrogen and 18.5% carbon. And when the living beings are burnt, all are reduced to ashes. And it is reduced to carbon as hydrogen escapes. All, whether rich or poor, whether king or slave, whether learned or illiterate, all would be reduced, if burnt, like these ashes we have got from burning the palm leaves we received last year on Palm Sunday.
- Ash infuses hope: Our being reduced to ashes, need not depress or frustrate us. Ashes give us hope as well. Think of prophet Ezekiel (Ch 37) in the field of bones. He sees bones scattered everywhere – He becomes desolate and discouraged. He sees the imagination-screen becoming active and alive. His imagination takes over and he asks: Can these bones live? But God tells him: Talk to the bones. And behold, tendons attach bones, flesh comes upon, and then skin covers it. What is missing? Breath of life! And that also finally comes in. Now, dry bones are alive! Similarly ash indicates that crisis could lead us to creativity. We have fought with raw hands of ruthless covid-pandemic. We have been surfing on the waves of crisis. But now we need to put on hope. We need to get up and walk down like Phoenix bird which could rise up from ashes.
- Ash invites us to change for the better: The priest, as he puts ashes on our forehead invites us to repent and to believe in the Gospel. Repentance is returning to God, regaining one’s rights and privileges. It is also returning to our fellow human beings. Repentance is an invitation for reconciliation – Reconciliation is triple, namely with God, with our fellow human beings, and with the nature which is our common home. As we repent from our sins and sinful attitudes and return to God, we need to repent from our sins against our fellow human beings’ rights, equality, and dignity. Jesus said: when you come to the altar and you remember that you have something against your brother or sister, first get reconciled with your brother and sister and then come to me (Mt 5:23f) – I could wait for you. And one other reconciliation is with our environment – We have stretched our ecology and environment too much and the nature has become irreparable. We need to do our act of reconciliation in restoring our environment to its original pristine nature.
- The value of Ash: We have burnt the palms of last Palm Sunday and we have got this ash – It is not mere carbon, though it is ash. Eric Werner in his book The Geography of Bliss (2008) writes: “It’s worth considering carbon. We wouldn’t be here without it. Carbon is the basis of all life, happy and otherwise. Carbon is also a chameleon atom. Assemble it one way – in tight, interlocking rows – and you have a diamond. Assemble it another way – a disorganized jumble – and you have a handful of soot (charcoal).” Ash may be carbon but it contains life, just like carbon can become diamond. A piece of wood, internally burnt in high temperature and heavily compressed under the earth, become a diamond. We too, when compressed and tested in fire of obstacles and failures and when we keep up our patience and hope, we become diamonds for God.
Spirit of Lent: The readings we have listened today imparts us the invitation of the Lord. Through prophet Joel the Lord indicates his longing for His people to return to Him and He, in turn, assures his gracious, compassionate, and abounding love (Joel 2:13). Elsewhere, in the words of Isaiah, the Lord would say, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be (white) like wool” (Is 1;18). This is the infinite love of God. All we have to do is, take the first step towards God and God takes over the rest. Paul, on his part, would put the same across from our perspective of gratitude. He argues that God who had no sin made Himself sinful and died for us. And now it is our turn to be reconciled to God (2 Cor 5:21). And Jesus shows us the way. He is all for praying and doing penance – He fully advocates helping the needy and doing penance. But with one condition: all the good works should be in secret (Mt 6:4) and they should not be done for the sake of advertisement. Do good works, Jesus would day, but do it quietly: Let not your left hand know what your right is doing (Mt 6:3). This is the spirit of Lent.
Further, Lent is a time to let things go. It is not a time of temporary deprivation and then, after 40 days, compensating what we missed. Some would not take sugar for 40 days, but would make it up with the Easter cake after 40 days. This is compensation but Lent is about shedding off what is unnecessary and unwanted once for all.
Meaning for Life: Ash Wednesday reminds us that we take 40 days to look back the way we have walked through – We reflect what have we done: We have done good sometimes and not so good at some other times. We thank the Lord for the good we did and we ask the Lord to show the way how to turn away from our sinful tendency and get back to Him.
These 40 days we would often reflect on the words of the Lord, such as “I need mercy and not sacrifice” (Hos 6:6). When it comes to our fellow human beings, it is not just sharing our goods with others but it is sharing our goodness for the betterment of others. It is not what I do to others but what I am to others. It is not the acts of charity and help I extend but it is my attitude towards others in accepting them as my brother and sister and to realize that the entire human kind is our universal family. The Lenten season is the time to get convinced that it is not faith that God wants but justice. And our belief in God should be faith that does justice, for faith and justice, in God’s vocabulary, are synonym.
And the starting point, for both mercy and not sacrifice or faith that does justice, is compassion. There was a blind man sitting on the side of a road in a busy city center. He kept a card-board with the words: ‘I am blind, please help’. A few threw coins on the cloth he spread in front on him. A young lady came and turned the cardboard and wrote something on it and went away. The visually challenged person realized that more people were now offering help. In the evening the same girl came by and the visually challenged recognized her by her footsteps. He asked her: What did you do? I have got a lot of money. She calmly replied I just changed the words on the cardboard. I wrote: “Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it.” The compassion of the people made them help the needy.
During the Lenten season we are invited to do penance and to pray. Penance is to grow in compassion and to feel for the other especially those in need. And to pray is to talk to God as a friend talking to a friend. I like a little story. A little girl used to come to the temple daily, stand in front of the deity, close her eyes, say something, and would run away with all happiness. One day the temple priest asked her what prayer she was saying. She said: I do not know any prayer but I know A, B, C, D upto Z. I repeat it a few times and then tell God: “I don’t know any prayer, but it cannot be outside these alphabets. Please arrange the alphabets as you like according to my need.” It is a genuine and simple prayer.
Time of Lent is an invitation to be fully human and fully alive. It is an opportune time to become better and more acceptable to God and to our fellow human beings: Through personal prayers we come closer to God; and through our sacrifice and compassion in helping the needy we come closer to others. We are given an opportunity to take all efforts spiritually, mentally, and physically to help the needy. And Ash Wednesday tells us that we have to reach out to others in order to reach God as all are children of God. Either we go to God together or we do not meet him at all. Let us make the Lent not a grim season of penance and sacrifice but a joyful time of sharing with others what we have and what we are. In this time of reconciliation let us remember Ukraine for peace. Wish you all a grace-filled Lenten season to prepare ourselves to the joy of the Easter.
Francis P Xavier SJ
02Mar2022