By The Rev. Marek Zabriskie
I recently read about a man who was shopping at an office supply store on Ash Wednesday. When he got to the checkout counter with his purchase, the clerk said, “Excuse sir, but you have some toner on your forehead.”
Perhaps we have lost the significance of how Ash Wednesday and Lent can improve our spiritual lives. Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor notes, “I think it’s safe to say that Christians need never fear the commercialization of Ash Wednesday.”
I had a friend who had a great love for literature. He was getting his Ph.D. in English at a very secular university. He was writing his dissertation on C.S. Lewis. On Ash Wednesday, he found himself in church despite having no clue about what the ashes signified. When the priest rubbed the ashes on his forehead and made the sign of a cross and said, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” my friend was overwhelmed.
“It all came crashing home,” he later wrote. “I am finite, fragile, a creature who has been given these few short years to live. My agonizing about exactly what I believed seemed less pressing; my anxieties about where my life was going seemed a waste of time. I have been given this time now, I realized, before I return to dust, to be what I have been given to be. I was amazed by the power of a church service to tell me the truth about my life.”
My friend succumbed died last year after a long battle with illness, but before he had a magnificent spiritual journey, which led him to become a priest and eventually the dean of the Washington National Cathedral.
What is it about this day that can set us on such a long, spiritual journey? Ash Wednesday, is the beginning of Lent – that forty-day season of the Church Year that invites us to look in the mirror and examine our soul.
It is an invitation to put our spiritual life in better order. Just as we might clean out our attic or all the closets in our home, pitching out or giving away things and putting everything in its proper place, so, too, Lent is an opportunity for spring cleaning of the soul.
It’s customary to give up something during Lent in order to make more room for God in our lives. You may take on a simple spiritual practice like lighting a candle each night, reading a short passage of Scripture and sitting quietly to rest in God.
Another practice is to read through one of the gospels or one of Paul’s letters and let your hummingbird mind stop racing and come to a peaceful place and pray as you feel inspired.
The key is for Lent to help us focus on going deeper. By going deeper, I mean for us to get in touch with the underbelly of your life and do something about it.
As the priest rubs the ashes in the sign of a cross upon our foreheads, she says, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” These haunting words are a reminder of our mortality and our sinfulness. Each of our foreheads were marked at our baptism, when a priest made a sign of the cross with sacred oil and said, “You are marked as Christ’s own forever.”
St. Paul tells us that we are “adopted” by God in baptism. In the ancient Roman culture you could disown a child, but not if you had been adopted him or her. So, Paul said that we are adopted by God in baptism and become part of God’s family forever.
The bad news is that each of us can easily go astray. St. Paul puts it this way, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) There is a divided self within each of us.
In his book The Gulag of Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…”
Lent call us to examine our bad habits. All of us have them. If we have any doubts, we need only ask our family or closest friends.
In the gospel of Luke, the author writes, “Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath as was his ethos.” (Luke 4:16) “Ethos” is a Greek word that means habit. Jesus worshipped God on the Sabbath in the synagogue.
It was Jesus’ habit to pray daily to God. We are the product of our habits. If we want to be spiritual, we have to develop some spiritual habits. Lent is a perfect time to pick one spiritual discipline and begin practicing it.
In his letter to the Galatians, Paul says, “God has poured the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.” This comes through our baptism, and it is renewed by spiritual disciplines.
During Lent, the Church invites us to slow down, recharge our spirit and acknowledge what truly matters most in our overstimulated lives. The ashes on our foreheads are a sign that we are claimed by something far greater than ourselves and to clean out the attic of our soul.
Yes, we are mortal, and our lives are often messy. We are in need of healing. Some changes need to be made. But the ashes imposed on Ash Wednesday are a visible sign that we are ready to start a journey. Things can change. Lent is a season to grow, to heal, to discover wholeness and holiness. I wish you a prosperous Lent!
