TODAY IS ASH WEDNESDAY. Preachers will talk about ashes as a sign of our repentance. Some preachers will just take it for granted that we know what repentance means. For sure it means more than being sorry for my sins. Repentance has nothing really to do with giving up stuff for forty days. That's a tired old religious cliche.
Lent is supposed to expand my mind and heart ~ make it more Christ-ly. So I might think of more than just the ashes on my own forehead today. There's...
- the Jordanian pilot recently immolated...
- the city of Dresden, a single flame...
- the Twin Towers reduced to ash September 11, 2001...
- the ground around Auschwitz now ash and granulated bone...
- the metaphorical ashes of lives reduced to nothing by poverty...
- and the ashes of children's lives devastated by adult sin...
- the ash mountains where mining has destroyed the environment...
- the jungles that have been reduced to ash ~ slash and burn agriculture it's called...
- the ash of commercial flights shot down by wasted soldiers...
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki left in ashes...
When I was a boy I served the Latin Requiem Mass which had a sequence (a sung poem prayer) called the Dies Irae. The first verse:
Day of wrath, O day of mourning
see fulfilled the prophet's warning,
heaven and earth in ashes burning.
The Church dropped this hymn in the 1960's because it was thought by liturgists to be too scary and not Easter-y enough. I find it to be sobering. In thinking about our country, the word that comes to mind is malaise: a condition or unfocused feeling of general bodily weakness or discomfort.
Ash Wednesday's ashes invite us to a Lenten awakening, out of the malaise that afflicts us.
