ASH WEDNESDAY 2017
My dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
Just like it does every year, it seems that Lent has snuck up on us today, but here we are on Ash Wednesday, that time of year which the prayers for today’s Mass call “this joyful season” and “this great season of grace.”
Whether or not we are ready for it, we rarely think of Lent as a joyful season, as a great season of grace. You and I usually operate out of a juvenile understanding of Lent in which we grudgingly give up our favorite things: we stop eating chocolate, we stop watching “Real Housewives” or “The Bachelor” in the hope that such difficult sacrifices will somehow lead us to joy on Easter morning.
No wonder we are so often disappointed.
It might help us to recall today that the season of Lent should be primarily about honesty. Signing ourselves with ashes, as we will do today, is a symbol of honesty because it is an outward acknowledgement of what, deep down, we know is the truest things about us: that we are mortal. We are mortal, small and brief flashes of light and fire, like comets streaking across the sky.
So, during this season, the Church invites us to ask ourselves how our lives are going, whether we are living in honesty or in delusion, whether we are living in slavery or in interior freedom. Have we inverted our values or our choices by loving things and using people, rather than loving people and using things?
Honesty requires us to ask ourselves whether we are on the right path or have lost our WAY? Are we avoiding the consequences of our choices and behavior, or living in the TRUTH? Have we been chronically infected with what leads to emotional and spiritual death, or do we, in our relationships and in our own hearts, radiate with vibrant LIFE?
Looking at it that way, Lent is an honest meditation on the way, the truth, and the life, a meditation we make against the backdrop of the greatest truth of all: that God so loved the world that He sent His only Son that they who believe in Him may not die but may have eternal life.
Given the speed at which our lives move, given the volume of the noise that buzzes not only around us but also within us, we are lucky to have this season to reflect on our living in order to determine whether our lives are in or out of balance.
Any honesty about ourselves cannot help but reveal to us our disordered affections and priorities; and yet we embark upon this inward journey, not to cause ourselves undue guilt, but to become ever more amazed, amazed that God’s love for us is something we have not earned and do not deserve. God’s love for us is pure gift, and it is ours in full if we choose to accept it. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
The three disciplines today’s readings suggest that we practice during Lent will help us in our quest for honesty.
The first is to pray more often, put ourselves in the gaze of God for some minutes each day. So much of our living in the past year has probably become habitual and mindless, focused on immediate goals. Praying daily helps us to take the longer view about who we are and who we are becoming, grounded in the dignity that each of us, without exception, is a beloved son or daughter of God.
The second thing the Church recommends is self-discipline, to choose intentionally to defer gratification of some need, desire, whim or urge trusting that we will continue to live without having to satisfy them all right now. So much of our living this past year has probably become an unconscious slavery to our needs and our prejudices – along with an increasing sense of despair that we could survive without meeting them.
And lastly, the Church recommends doing deeds of charity in which we can confront the unconscious selfishness and entitlement which has probably seeped into our behavior, deeds of compassion and generosity which unite us more with the entire human family.
Despite what our lives have become or are becoming, God never abandons us. God never gives up on us. God gives us this special gift of his Son, Jesus, as our food and drink, the nourishment we need to have the strength we require for this journey within.
I said earlier that Lent was about the way, the truth, and the life. And so it is – as you remember that Jesus called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life and this joyful season, this great season of grace, reveals Him who is the Son of God, as our brother, the one who shows us the way to complete honesty, to complete inner peace, and, ultimately, to eternal life.
Let us welcome Him in the Eucharist today, and receive from Him His mercy, His comfort and His love.