This Wednesday marks the beginning of the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday, as it is known, gets its name from the Western Christian practice of signing the forehead with a cross using ash (traditionally made by burning the palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday). As that ashen cross is made, the priest usually pronounces the formula, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is meant to be a reminder of our mortality.
In the Hebrew Bible, ashes were also used as a sign of mourning or repentance. There was a custom in which people would dress in sack cloth (something like burlap) and heap ashes upon their head as a sign of their contrition. Job famously did this in the aftermath of his misfortunes, which his friends (and the traditional theology of his time) interpreted as a penalty for his having sinned.
So in many ways, Ash Wednesday - and the whole of the Lenten season - brings together the themes of mortality and repentance in a way that should give us pause.
Most fruitfully, that pause should allow for a self-examination that would lead us to first, recognize the ways in which we are not in alignment with the sacred grain of the universe — not in alignment with God, if you will — and then to recognize what kinds of changes need to be made in our lives in order to bring us into better alignment with the sacred flow of life. And, that pause should remind us that this project of finding alignment is time-limited: we will not go on forever, and so the project does have a sort of deadline.
The liturgies used for Ash Wednesday have long struck me as harsh. They over-emphasize themes of unworthiness and sinfulness in ways that can leave people leaving those liturgies with their sense of self-worth and self-esteem knocked out of them, and a dark cloud of impending divine judgment looming over them.
We should remember, however, that liturgy is a kind of art, a kind of poetry that is meant to break through to us in a way that will allow for an experience of transcendence, even of transformation. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is designed to shake us and wake us to uncomfortable realities in our lives that we tend to avoid or not wish to see. It is meant to move us into the very sort of reflection and self-examination I was just describing. And most people need a bit of a kick in the butt to get that process started.
It is also important to remember that Lent is a span of 40 days that culminates in a celebration of new life, a celebration that insists that new life is possible and available to each of us. All of us are meant to rise from the ashes of Ash Wednesday with something about us changed, or, at least, in the process of change. Lent is a season, not a lifetime, and like all seasons, it passes into something else, having left its mark on us and done in us what work it can.
There is a great tradition of taking on a new discipline or habit or letting go of something during Lent, and these can have their value. Sometimes, however, whatever is taken on or let go doesn’t really bring us close to the heart of what this season is really asking of us. It would be more fruitful, I think, to lay aside that tradition in favor of something at once more simple and more difficult: to really take stock of our lives, of the places where we are out of alignment, of the piles of ash that have accumulated in the different corners of our souls. And having done so, to repent — that is, to set off in a new direction such that, from one of more of these heaps of ashes, new life begins to arise.
Personally, I will try to approach Lent in this way this year, though I must admit that the past 4 years have felt like a long, on-going Lent. However, I can say that from the considerable amount of ash accumulated from the burning of nearly everything in my life, I have seen and continue to see new life rising. And so I perceive, in the circumstances of my own life, that these rhythms and seasons reflected in the liturgical year do play themselves out in our lives, in ways both terrible and beautiful. Perhaps, in the end, if all else fails, this Lenten season is simply an opportunity to lean into that truth.
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