Ash Wednesday ~ Entering the Forest of Marly Snow Effect ~ 1869

Camille Pissarro painted this picture, Entering the Forest of Marly, Snow Effect, in 1869, age 39. Here we can begin to see something of his new technique. His brush strokes have changed from his earliest work and the image is less camera like. Look at that wonderful sky! We know what this kind of snow feels like. The wall is tumbling on the left. The painting is not simply of the forest, but the entering of the forest. Indeed, two pilgrims are approaching that entrance.

Like the desert, the forest is a place of important symbolism. Our childhood stories often took place in or near the forest: Hansel and Gretel, Robin Hood, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White. The forest is a place of testing; a symbolic place where we search for meaning. In the forest, something of mystery is revealed to us. It is a realm of yet to be explored unknowns, where we discover something new about ourselves.   

Some people are bitterly resistant to self-discovery or self-knowledge. Such insight might well require change. "I'm fine, just the way I am; take it or leave it." I can't very well claim to be a follower of the One who calls himself, LIGHT, and talk that way.

We might say on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, along with the two pilgrims entering the forest: I want to know myself better before God.

The forest can be dark and daunting. We can get lost in the forest. But Pissarro has wisely (if unconsciously) filled the front of the picture with snow. We can even see some pilgrim footprints. The earth, and our journey-ing along the earth-way, is sprinkled, even covered with heaven. Let's trust that as we set out these forty days - that we won't just bump around in forest-fear, but come out the other side of the forest, glad for something of the new maturity, wisdom, trust and insight of Easter.

Setting Out On Ash Wednesday

The word Lent comes from the Old English word for lengthen - as in: "The spring days are lengthening." We say of Lent that it lasts forty days because the gospels tell us that Jesus fasted and was tempted in the wilderness for forty days. The forty days echo the wandering of the Hebrews in the Sinai Desert for forty years, and that in Noah's day it rained for forty days and forty nights. 

But then we can get fussy and start debating whether the Sundays of Lent "count". If I intend to set out into Lent - then I should just do it; God isn't counting. Forty is a symbolic number that means, "a long time." 

The day begins with ashes...an outer sign of an interior or invisible reality. The first words of the first reading at Mass today: "Even now," says the Lord, "return to me with all your heart...rend your hearts and not your garments." Joel 2:12  Lent is interior.

The little cross on our foreheads is supposed to remind us that we'll die some day. I don't have forever to learn forgiveness. I don't have forever to learn to "let it go." I don't have forever to get Christ's new mind. I don't have forever to get real inner peace.

But there's more to ashes than just a death-reminder. Like snow, ashes are called a poor man's fertilizer. Farmers and gardeners have long spread ashes on their gardens and fields in the spring to make them more alive. It's said that the winter wood-ashes sweeten the soil. The whole human race could do with some sweetening. So maybe this Lent we'll sweeten a bit. But some people (perhaps men more than women) might object: a sweet person is delicate, a sissy, soft, a loser, weak, easily taken advantage of.

But sweet really means: non aggressive, not bitter, not hardened or harsh. A sweet person is tender-hearted, understanding, respectful, forgiving. As I accept the ashes today, I accept that I am going to die someday, but before that day comes, I would like to know that I have sweetened somewhat. 

As I walk up the church aisle today to receive the ashes, I might pray quietly about this - ashes spread for the sweetening of soil. My inner soil. My inner garden.

Lenten Mercy-Meditation: Ash Wednesday

It's Ash Wednesday in the Jubilee Year of Mercy. The Hebrew word for mercy is Hesed. Perhaps better than translating HESED as mercy ("I could blow you away for what you did to me, but instead I'll have mercy on you," we might use the word kindness.

It's a hard world and there's more than a little to suggest that we're losing touch with each other; becoming strangers to kindness. A flight attendant told me that while he stands inside the door of the plane greeting people as they board, most people don't even look up at him, let alone return the greeting, but are lost in their technology.

Lent is called the Church's Springtime. And with the springtime comes warming. Human beings are programmed to give and receive emotional warmth - we don't do well without it. Indeed, when the life-story is told of so many criminals and murderers, we come to understand that human warmth was often lacking from the start. 

Pietro Ferruci in his book, The Power of Kindness tells of a client who lived in a building with walls thin enough to hear what went on in the apartments on either side of hers. Every night, the parents of a new born would put the baby in to sleep while they retired to the living room to watch television. Unfailingly the baby screamed and cried in the deep anguish of loneliness with the parents failing to respond.

While the woman felt that confronting the parents might make things worse, she also realized that if she could hear the baby's crying that likely the baby would be able to hear her. And so every night when the screams and cries began, the woman would sing lullabies through the wall and talk to the unseen baby softly and tenderly, and the crying stopped. The warmth of sound can alleviate suffering! That's mercy!

Perhaps the best of what it means to be human gives us insight into what God is like. God is kindness. Jesus puts a human face to it: "Little Zacchaeus, come down out of the sycamore leaf-screen where you hide; I want to have dinner with you and your friends tonight." (Luke 19: 1-10)

This Lent: not to bother giving up things that leave us un-transformed, but rather to practice mercy-kindness.

Ash Wednesday

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.