Ash Wednesday – 14 February 2024
We enter the Season of Lent, that time given us each year to renew our baptismal lives. In the waters of baptism we died to a purely natural life and we rose to a new life of promise and expectation. Now in the weeks that are to follow. as we prepare to celebrate Easter. we remember that extraordinary mystery into which we were immersed, and we admit that we are only half-living, and only fitfully loving. Yes, we recognise that the remarkable conversion detailed in our baptism is far from achieved, and we commit ourselves again to a new moment,
We are called always into conversion. Again we are invited to see life in new ways, in broader terms and with deeper and deeper resonances. We are called to follow the way of Jesus, a way that hollows us out, that strips us of our pretences, and our illusions, and our defences, so that we might live with hearts open in a self-giving to one another.
Yes, the call of Jesus to us is, “Come and die.” We die to something to rise to something. We cannot follow Jesus without being prepared to die. Something must die if we are to follow him. And what must die? What must die is a life lived in the illusion of self- sufficiency. What must die is a life that is guarded, defended, self-protected. What must die is a life enclosed in on itself, a life that places self-preservation and self-promotion as the means to happiness. In the way of Jesus, happiness can only be achieved when we forget about ourselves – even for a moment – and when we become alive to the needs of the one who stands before me. Freedom is never the experience of freedom from something. Christian freedom is always a freedom for something – ultimately the freedom to be able truly to love. It is the freedom to be able to listen to another, and the freedom to give myself to others. In so doing, we turn away from the places of captivity in our life, and turn towards the places which liberate our hearts. We turn from what holds us in the grip of fear and stretch out to the horizon of possibility, we turn from the somnolence that covers our days like a pall, and we awaken to fresh energy and purposefulness. We say no to that which leads us into the pain of isolation and say yes to that which offers the prospect of communion with others. We turn from death to life.
It is in this context that Jesus puts before us as we begin our journey of Lent, the three pillars of Jewish spirituality – prayer, fasting, almsgiving. As Pope Francis observes, prayer enables “our hearts to root out our secret lies and forms of self-deception . . . Fasting weakens our tendency to violence . . . it allows us to experience what the destitute and the starting having to endure . . . [and] it expresses our own spiritual hunger and thirst for life in God. Fasting wakes us up . . . [And] Almsgiving sets us free from greed.”
These three practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving move us from indifference and carelessness to concern and commitment. They seek to help us regain our focus in life. But most importantly in different ways they help us to regain the recognition that we are not self-sufficient. They help us die to the presumption that we do not need God and others in our life. They place us before God and others in a new light. They bring home to us that we find ourselves only in a life lived with and through others. They take us away from a life lived simply in reference to myself and lead me to recognise that our hearts become warm again and glow with fire when we have died to ourselves and risen to others.
How this might look for each of us is unique. As Jesus indicates to us in the gospel today if such practices are going to have real effect for us, there is no room for trumpeting anything. There is no room for parading anything because the things we really need to do this Lent are deeply personal. If I am honestly trying to enter the invitation of this time, then only I know what I truly need to do. Perhaps, in fact, I would not want anyone else know, because the real changes I need to make effect the very personal side of my life – where I know I sin, where I know selfishness truly exists in my heart, where I know I have given up and lost my focus. I really would not too many people to know these things about me! But God knows these areas, and perhaps only God knows. Jesus is saying to us, “let go, then, of trying to build yourself up by what others might think of you; now is the time to come home to yourself, to go into yourself and discover yourself as God knows you, and to make those changes in your life that only he and you know you truly need to make.”
As we hear in the gospel of this day which opens the Season of Lent for us, Jesus himself knows the seductiveness of the ego, and how it can hijack even our religious aspiration. Three times Jesus repeats that what we undertake in the transformation of our life “must be in secret, for the Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.” This repetition underlines with unmistakable clarity the correct order of things. Religious practice is not to exist for the purposes of bolstering our ego. Only in the crucifixion of the ego, especially the religious ego, will we discover a genuine and truly transformative religious practice. The outcome cannot be the ego in which I am remain simply trapped in myself. The outcome must be, instead, no ego, a freedom from ego so that I might have a freedom to move out beyond myself to others.
And so, let us now bless ourselves with ash as a sign of our readiness to enter the journey of death so that new life might spring within us.
350 total views, 1 views today