Karooso

Today (February 13^th) is Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Western Christian calendar. It falls 46 days before Easter. While not specifically instituted in the Scriptures, Lent is roughly analogous to several 40 day periods in Scripture.  It has been compared to the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness enduring temptation from Satan (Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, and Luke 4:1–13); the 40 days Moses spent fasting and repenting after the making of the golden calf (Deut. 9:18); the 40 days Moses fasted on the mountain top as God gave him the Law (Exodus 34:28); and the forty years that the people spent in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land.  In the spirit of these biblical moments Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of a 40-day period of prayer and fasting (called Lent), before entering the great celebration of Easter.

To me it was always the time of year that all my Catholic friends had grey smudges on their foreheads.  It seemed a strange and unfamiliar practice.  Ash Wednesday, of course,  derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of Christians as a reminder and celebration of human mortality, and as a sign of mourning and repentance to God.

The symbol is ancient. Ashes were used in ancient times to express mourning. An ancient example of expressing penitence in this way is found in Job 2:12 and 42:3–6. The prophet Jeremiah calls for repentance this way: "O daughter of my people, gird on sackcloth, roll in the ashes" (Jer. 6:26). The prophet Daniel recounted pleading to God this way: "I turned to the Lord God, pleading in earnest prayer, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes" (Daniel 9:3).

Other examples are found in several other books of the Bible including, Numbers 19:9, 19:17, Job 2:8, Jonah 3:6, Matthew 11:21, and Luke 10:13. Ezekiel 9 also speaks of a linen-clad messenger marking the forehead of the city inhabitants that have sorrow over the sins of the people. Those with the mark are spared destruction.

So … TODAY marks the beginning of a journey to Easter. TODAY I'm working past my childish and xenophobic view of the ritual to reflect on what Ash Wednesday means for me -- a life-long, die-hard, Baptist. You see ... the ashes are a symbol of something deeper and wider than any one Christian tradition.  The ashes are a symbol of our own frail humanity … they are a remembrance of our desperate need for God -- “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19).

Later this week I’ll write on some practical things we can do to observe Lent.  But for now, in light of Ash Wednesday, I leave you with Gen. 3:19 … and some profound thoughts on that verse by Fr. Walter Burghardt, S.J.:

“Pretty grim, isn’t it? Only if you stop there; only if you stop with the symbol that is dust. But that symbol is incomplete. When I dust your forehead, I dust it with another symbol: the sign of the cross. And that symbol declares that dust has been redeemed. Redeemed not in some shadowy sense but with startling realism. . . . And so, ever since Bethlehem and Calvary, this speck of humanity that is you, this is now “charged with the grandeur of God.” You are brothers and sisters of God-in-flesh. Your dust is literally electric with God’s own life; your nothingness is filled with God’s eternity. Your nothingness has Christ’s own shape.

With this new shape, the sentence “You are dust and to dust you will return” ought no longer terrify us. We no longer have to despair at our ceaseless downward movement to death. Of course we shall die; and I, for one, am not anxious to die — I love this life with a passion that is perhaps unchristian. But the sign of the cross cries to us that death is not the end of our dust.”