“Ashes”

In browsing around the blogosphere in recent days for Lent resources and reflections, I’ve read literally dozens of excellent blog entries and meditations. There are a few that particularly stand out in my mind, however. The following meditation for Ash Wednesday on a blog by Pat McDonough is one of them.

Here’s a portion.

A colleague of mine recently recounted the experience of watching his house burn to the ground. The good news is that no one was hurt. The bad news: everything that the family owned was lost. Life as they knew it had been reduced to ashes.

Feelings of helplessness and vulnerability overwhelmed him, but in the months that followed the fire, he was also overwhelmed by the goodness of neighbors and the generosity of friends. “When everything I owned was gone, and I had nothing to call my own but the ashes at my feet, my worldview changed completely. I was less distracted and much more focused on things that I had overlooked prior to that point in my life. I understood, perhaps for the first time, the concept of community, of inter-dependence, and our shared dependence on the grace of God.”

Without knowing it, my colleague summed up the meaning of Ash Wednesday, the arrival of forty days focused on our conversion from sin and solitary thinking to compassion and Christian community. Think back to 9/11. Images of towers tumbling while thousands of people, covered in ash, fought for their lives, evoked a worldwide response of compassion and communal thinking. We knew with certainty that day, that life is much more fragile than we once believed. While this has always been true, we managed to create an illusion for ourselves, one that comforted us and distracted us from what my colleague called our inter-dependence on each other and our shared dependence on God. If steel towers could fall and human lives evaporate in seconds, then the Good News of Jesus Christ is needed more urgently than ever before.

The ashen cross placed on my forehead this year is a reminder that the courage and compassion of Jesus Christ is the only response to our common vulnerability, to the overwhelming sense of helplessness that haunts the third millennium. We have the power to reduce each other to ashes, to extinguish humanity and bring an end to Creation. The anointing of Ash Wednesday draws our vision toward our vulnerability, toward the fragility of life and the need for forgiveness in a world where we are asked to be a sign of Christ to others.

Go read it all, especially to see how she gets to her stunning closing line:

The ashes of Lent are a powerful symbol. May we be worthy to wear them, to carry a cross of ash, a symbol of Christ’s sacrificial love.

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