Ash Wednesday

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We are told in the Book of Genesis, “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7).

Genesis is very clear about the origin of man, where we have come from, where we're going.

Ash Wednesday is a day on which Our Mother the Church reminds us of where we have come from. How important in life it is to remember where we have come from, to remember our roots.

Our Mother the Church reminds us that we are dust. “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19). I often think that whoever dreamed up the ceremony of the ashes was a bit of a genius, because it's so simple, yet it's so clear.

You take the palm branches of the previous Palm Sunday, you burn them, they become ash, which really is dirt. Somebody defined dirt once as “matter that is in the wrong place” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger). If clay is in the garden, it's clay; if it's in the house, it's dirt.

Our Mother the Church comes along, and she blesses this dirt, as though reminding us that everything that God has created is good and can be made holy.

Then Our Mother the Church does a very curious thing: she takes this ash, and she smears it on our face. She dirties our face.

We spend most of our life trying to keep our faces clean. Our mothers and fathers probably have asked us ever since we were young: Did you wash your face? Did you wash behind your ears?

Our Mother the Church comes along one day each year and dirties our faces for us. As she does so, she says a very important message: “Remember, man...”, as though saying, remember, and don't ever forget it—who you are, where you come from. It's a message of humility.

Don't get any airs and graces because you're nothing—you're just dust. Every year the Church reminds us of that message, or gives us the opportunity to hear it, so that we never ever forget it—where we're going; where we've come from.

A man once remarked to me that our churches are full of small, sentimental, material things: holy water, Stations of the Cross, crucifixes, candles, incense.

Among those material things are the ashes. Often those material things can come to mean a lot to us.

Pope St. John Paul II liked to say that we go to the great spiritual messages through physical signs and symbols. Those physical signs and symbols come to be very important. Often little children—that's what they see, that's what they understand. They go to the spiritual through the material.

That's one of the reasons why we have to take very good care of these little, small, material things, because they can transmit wonderful spiritual messages, so that every child gets that message into his mind and heart and soul—that “you are dust”—knows where we're coming from, knows where we're going.

Often those material things, speak volumes to millions of other people. Cardinal Dolan in New York has said how sometimes after the ceremony of the ashes, he stands on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral and offers ashes to any passersby.

He has said how it's interesting how many atheists, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews come to receive the ashes. Somehow it speaks to them about the origin of man and the meaning and purpose of our life.

Today, we're reminded on Ash Wednesday of the importance of dust.

A man in Singapore told me once how his father had died fifty years previous. He was buried in a center city cemetery which was going to be moved to the outskirts of the city because that had become very valuable land.

A family member was asked to come and be present at the exhumation of all the remains. He was there when his father's grave was dug.

He said after fifty years the only thing that was left was a little bit of the lid of the coffin. He remarked to me: ‘You know, this business of being dust, it's really true, you know.’

These are very deep lessons for us to learn. We might become the most important man in the world. We might become the most famous Super Bowl player in American history. We might become the Queen of England. We might be a Christian Dior.

But ultimately, we are just dust, and we will go back to being dust.

One time in the 1960s there was a very famous heavyweight boxing champion of the world: Muhammad Ali. He was very vocal. He liked to talk a lot about Allah.

One time he was in Sydney for a title fight. In a press conference, one of the journalists asked him: Look, now that you're the heavyweight champion of the world, why don't you give Allah a rest for a while? Why don't you talk about something else?

Muhammad Ali reached out and he got the journalist’s nostrils with one hand and his lips with the other, and held them tightly closed so that he couldn't breathe—rather an uncomfortable position to be in, to have your nostrils and your lips in the hands of the heavyweight champion of the world.

The guy was sort of gasping, turning blue in the face. Muhammad Ali said to him, ‘Would you like me to let go?’ And the guy nodded his head. Then he began to breathe.

Muhammad Ali said to him: ‘Can you feel the oxygen going down inside your lung?’ And the guy nodded his head. ‘Can you feel it being taken up by the whole of the globe?’ He said yes. ‘You feel it reaching the last cell of your little toe?’ Again, the guy nodded his head.

Muhammad Ali said: ‘God breathed into man the breath of life.’ In other words, every breath that we take, it's because God allows us to take that breath, and ‘I'll talk about Allah as much as I want.’

The simplicity of the ceremony of the ashes and its message is very profound. It speaks to the depth of man in all sorts of ways.

We have the forty days of Lent in front of us—a time that the Church uses to call us to conversion. We're told in Scripture, “Return to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12).

The heart is very important in our faith. God reads the heart. The Church invites us in these days to look into our heart, to fashion our hearts after the heart of Christ.

When God looks into our hearts, is He happy with what He finds there? He tells us in Scripture that “out of the heart of man come all sorts of evil things” (Mark 7:21).

Our Mother invites us to change our heart during these days. Try and get out all the bad things that may be there, perhaps through a good Confession. Or through a greater acquisition of graces through the sacraments. Or a more frequent reception of Holy Communion. Or a more frequent confession, so that we can change our hearts.

“When you pray,” we're told in the Gospel of today, “go to your room, and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matt. 6:6).

Prayer is a very personal thing. It's our own intimate relationship with Our Father God. It's a heart-to-heart relationship. That's what friendship is. Friendship with God and friendship with others involve the heart.

Our Lord invites us to take very good care of our hearts. Keep it in good shape; not to allow it to get sullied by anything. If it ever gets a bit messed up, we go back to the sacrament of Confession and we cleanse our hearts.

We say to Our Lord, “Create a clean heart in me” (Ps. 51:10). A new heart. “Take out my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh” (cf. Ezek. 36:26).

Frequently, in the Responsorial Psalm during these days, we're going to read: “A humble and contrite heart, O Lord, you will not spurn” (Ps. 51:17). Part of the goal of our Christian life is to develop a humble and contrite heart.

Humble, because we're always aware of who we are and where we've come from—the reality of our own dust. We're nothing. We can do nothing. It's only in and through the grace of God that we can achieve anything.

Therefore, we look for that grace in the sacraments. We go closer to God with the hunger: Lord, let me know your face. We seek Him. Prophet Joel says, “Rend your heart and not your garments” (Joel 2:13).

Lent invites us to disconnect a little bit from the exterior things of our life and of this world, and look a little more into our interior. If I want the world to be a better place, then I have to be a better person—more virtuous, more humble, more charitable, more patient, more kind, more pure and chaste.

The Holy Spirit is always ready to transform our hearts, to lead us further in God's way of truth and holiness. This is the great force in our life: the Holy Spirit. We can ask Our Lord for the grace to use well this time of interior purification.

Sometimes, we think of Lent as a time of exterior purification, which is fine, which is also very true. We go very often to interior purification through exterior purification, through denying ourselves certain pleasures—trying to get up on time, eating a little bit less of what we like and a little more of what we don't like, not complaining, not criticizing, maybe not indulging in some pleasure or whim that we enjoy.

One time many years ago, I was having lunch with an 85-year-old Irish priest who was in a very faraway place. After lunch, we had coffee and I offered him the sugar for his coffee. He said, “No, thanks, I'm off it for Lent.”

I was rather edified. Here was this 85-year-old priest who was living Lent. I thought, before he was seven years of age his parents must have taught him very deeply about the meaning of Lent.

An awful lot of our spiritual preparation takes place before we're seven years of age. Try and introduce your children to these practices—very healthy spiritual practices—from an early age. Expose them to the ashes. You'll see they can come to love these things.

Or if you have an opportunity to get to Mass more frequently during Lent, that's a very good thing to offer to God—the effort to get up and make the time, and walk to where we have to go, and make the little efforts if it's raining, et cetera.

Or see if in your family you can make some visits to the poor or the sick, to bring some bit of joy into families that have a little less.

Or perhaps expose your children to the Way of the Cross, a wonderful devotion that we have in our Church, very appropriate for Lent, where we look at Christ on the Cross, follow Him along that journey, which has so many lessons for us.

Christ falls down, but He gets up again. In some ways, the story of our life is there.

He allows His heart to be pierced by a lance. He doesn't come down off the Cross. He stays there, so that we, when we get temptations to come down off the cross in our work, in our family, in our marriage, we also learn how to stay there.

The Way of the Cross teaches us wonderful things, invites us to accept the blows that may come as a means to grow in virtue, in humility, in acceptance of the will of God; to develop our character in all sorts of ways; and to suspend all the bad interior things that may be there inside us—criticisms, judgments.

Sometimes we hear a lot about fasting and abstinence in Lent—the exterior fasting—on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, but often, it's the interior things that we have to fast from a little more: from our criticisms, from our judgments, from our complaints, from our comparisons.

We're told in the Gospel about the Pharisee who said: “God, I thank you that I'm not like the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11).

There's a bit of the Pharisee inside each one of us. It's easy for us to be a modern-day Pharisee, to say all sorts of things externally, but to be completely different on the inside.

That's why we have to purify the inside, to take care with our heart: “Rend your heart and not your garments” so that when God looks into our hearts and reads our hearts, He sees beautiful things there.

“In our life,” we're told by St. Josemaría in Christ Is Passing By, “in the life of Christians, our first conversion—that unique moment which each of us remembers, when we clearly understood everything the Lord was asking of us—is certainly very significant.

“But the later conversions are even more important, and they are increasingly demanding. To facilitate the work of grace in these conversions, we need to keep our soul young; we have to call upon our Lord, know how to listen to him and, having found out what has gone wrong, know how to ask his pardon” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 57).

When Our Lord called Peter and Andrew, He said, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19). That was the beginning. But it wasn't the end. That was their first conversion.

Later, Our Lord was to say, “Feed my lambs...feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17). There were later and deeper conversions: conversions to a deeper responsibility; conversions from the spiritual to a deeper spirituality, from humility to a deeper humility; from faith to a greater faith.

All the time, Our Lord is leading us forward along the pathway of holiness, the pilgrimage of faith which our Christian vocation is. Lent can be a great stimulus. A lady told me once: I look forward to Lent and Advent. I hadn't heard that before; I was rather impressed.

But you see, Lent is a time of great spiritual bonanza. If you have a chance, try and follow the liturgy of Lent closely: the Responsorial Psalms, the Alleluia verse, the Entrance Antiphon.

Smaller parts of the liturgy, you'll find a great richness there, and a great beauty in the liturgy that will move your heart and whet your appetite for spiritual things, and help you to a much deeper approach to this whole period.

There are many aspirations that you may find in the words of the liturgy, and also in the words of Scripture that we read every day.

Incidentally, somebody told me that we Catholics have more exposure to Scripture than any other Christian denomination, because if we attend Mass regularly, especially on weekdays, we get the choicest parts of Scripture pre-selected for us in a regular way, so that our eyes fall on this great spiritual treasure which is Scripture.

We absorb these things in all these prayers of the liturgy. That's particularly true of Lent—to savor that richness and to thank God for it.

Possibly from those short prayers, you may get little aspirations that can help you in the rest of the day, like in the Way of the Cross, we say: “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”

Many little phrases can come to us that can be very meaningful, can help us to supernaturalize our day, and sanctify it. Also, it can give us great peace and joy in leading us to prayer.

One thing we can try and focus on in this month is also the richness of Confession—of our own personal Confession—to get to Confession frequently, to be always in the state of grace, and to see how, if possible, we can reach out to others in the sacrament of Confession.

There was a student in Tokyo once, who had heard about doing the apostolate of confession. In Japan, this population is about 1 percent Christian or Catholic. This student was in the library of the university one time and was thinking, ‘If there are 100 people in this library, possibly one of them is Catholic.’

But then he thought, ‘The chances of bumping up against that Catholic are very rare, but I still have to try and do the apostolate of Confession.’ He leaned over to the student in front of him at the table and said: ‘Hey, how would you like to go to Confession?’

The person said: ‘What's that?’ And he said: ‘You go into this little box and it's all dark and there's a little grill there and you tell the priest all the bad things you have inside you. You get all of them out, you empty everything out, all the garbage, all the rubbish. And then you feel wonderful; you come out of there feeling as light as a feather.’

The guy said: ‘Oh, I think I'd like to try that.’ He began instruction, and three months later, he was baptized and went to Confession.

We never know where that apostolate of Confession is going to lead us in helping many other hearts and souls to grow, and to help the Blood of Christ to get in there and wash away the sins.

Sin is the ugliest reality on the planet. The only thing that we have to be afraid of is sin, because sin is the only thing that will keep us out of heaven.

All the things that the world may present to us as evils are not really evils—not having material things, losing our job, not having this or that, not having money, sickness or disease, or all the other things that can happen.

None of those things can keep us out of heaven—they may be the means to getting to heaven.

Our faith gives us an enormously positive outlook on the world, on creation, on our life. All the different moments of our life are opportunities for us to grow in the goals of our Christian formation—which are holiness and apostolate.

We're told in the Furrow, “A spirit of mortification, rather than being just an outward show of Love, arises as one of its consequences. If you fail in one of these little proofs, acknowledge that your love for the Love is wavering” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 981).

The Church invites us to deny ourselves little things externally because of the effect that that has interiorly on our soul. We say “no” to the body in order to say “yes” to the soul.

Lent is all about our soul. Often if God permits some pain in our body, or some contradiction, or some reversal of fortune, it's because He wants our soul to fly. The spiritual realities can become enormously rich and enormously important. We can come to discover the greater reality of the spiritual.

I was passing through Dublin airport one morning at 8 o'clock and a man in a wheelchair beckoned to me to come over. He saw I was a priest and he wanted to talk to me, and initially, he asked me to get an attendant to help him to go to the washroom, which I did.

But then while we waited for the attendant, he said to me, ‘You know, today is a very difficult day for me; it's the fifth anniversary of the death of my eldest son in a motorbike accident.’

And my heart sank. Eight o'clock in the morning—I wasn't expecting this.

But he was a man going through a difficult moment, he sees a priest and wants a bit of a spiritual uplift. Then he explained how he was an accountant, he worked in London, but he had developed multiple sclerosis.

The last few years of his life he'd been confined to a wheelchair. His body had become limited at the very height of his career.

But, he said, ‘Suddenly all the spiritual things have come to mean an awful lot to me: I go to the sacraments more frequently, I get to receive the Anointing of the Sick.’ He says, ‘This gives me great joy and a great uplift.’

While we were waiting for the attendant to come, he was sort of giving me a whole catechesis on the sacraments; the effect of the sacraments in his life.

I was the one who benefited from that encounter. I learned so much, and forty years later I'm still talking about it.

There are souls all around us: souls who are looking for a spiritual uplift, souls that need to have their eyes open to the spiritual realities of the world, which are very rich, very beautiful.

Modern materialism, the culture in which we live, tends to tell us that man has no soul. Man is just a thing—that's why we can abort him or euthanize him. It doesn't matter; he's disposable.

But all the great religions of the world speak about the spiritual nature of man—Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity—it's one thing we all have in common: a belief in the spiritual nature of man.

“Have you noticed,” we're told in the Furrow, “that mortified souls, because of their simplicity, have a greater enjoyment of good things, even in this world?” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Pint 982).

When we deny our body certain pleasures, often it opens the eyes of our soul to deeper realities, to greater pleasures. Spiritual pleasures.

Sometimes as we move on in life, all the things that gave us pleasure earlier—playing sports, maybe, sweets, watching things on TV or movies or whatever—maybe, we find those pleasures pass. We get much greater joy from the spiritual things.

As the body begins to decay, the soul can grow and grow, discover a new youthfulness, a new joy.

We're told in The Furrow, Point 983: “Without mortification there is no happiness on earth.”

“It's of great benefit,” says St. Paul, “that we all deny ourselves little pleasures. All things are pleasurable to me, but not all things are necessary or expedient” (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23).

Not all things are necessary. It's very good in every person's life that they deny themselves the fruit of a certain tree; certain pleasures that come from certain things.

We all need that salt of mortification. It strengthens our character, strengthens our soul, we grow in fortitude, we know how to say no to ourselves and sometimes to other people, so that we have a certain backbone.

“When you make up your mind to be more mortified,” we're told, “your interior life will improve and you will be much more fruitful” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 984).

The Church invites us to think of this period of Lent as training for the marathon. Any great Kenyan marathon runner has to run up and down mountains to strengthen their muscles and practice their breathing—all these sorts of things.

This is like a spiritual marathon. The Church gives us an opportunity every year to get into better shape spiritually and to help everybody around us to do the same thing.

“Let us not forget,” we're told by St. Josemaría, “that in all human activities there must be men and women who, in their lives and work, raise Christ's cross aloft for all to see, as an act of reparation.

“It is a symbol of peace and of joy, a symbol of the Redemption and of the unity of the human race. It is a symbol of the love that the Most Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit had, and continues to have, for mankind” (J. Escrivá, Furrow, Point 985).

The cross needs to be there in our life. When we go closer to the Mass, we go closer to the unbloody renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, which can come to have great meaning for us.

Lent can be a time to be more focused on the Mass, make our attendance more frequent, and work at our Mass a little bit, so that it can truly become the summit and the source of our whole spiritual life, the center and the root.

From a deeper contemplation of Christ on the Cross, we come to understand better the workings of divine grace in our soul.

Fulton Sheen says that when the priest raises his hands to give the absolution and confession, the Blood of Christ is dripping from his hands. We're told in Scripture, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin” (Heb. 9:22).

It's the Blood of Christ that washes away our sins. Blessed be His most Precious Blood. Lent is also a time when we can contemplate the Precious Blood of Christ. Thank God for shedding His Blood.

In that way, we prepare for the great feast of Easter, the most important feast in the whole of the liturgical year that is there for us to savor in a deeper way every year, in the beauty of its liturgy and the ceremonies, so that more and more, it comes to be a very important part of our life.

We can ask Our Lady that we might never forget that we are dust, that we might savor days like today—Ash Wednesday—and help other people around us too, to come to appreciate the great spiritual richness of days like today.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

CPG