Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday
22 February 2023

    Today we have begun the holy season of renewal known as Lent.  This season is a time of spiritual exercises, engagement in serious spiritual battle, by repentance, acts of penance, and the mercy of confession to be restored in the dignity begun in us at baptism.  At least that is what we should be doing in this holy opportunity of the season of Lent!

  There are two basic realities as we begin Lent that should cause us to reflect and to evaluate the direction of our lives.  (1) God is rich in mercy and loves us and He does not desire the sinner to die.  And, (2) we are wretched sinners who, in justice, deserve death and punishment for our sins, even eternal punishment.  I bet we don’t think of that nearly often enough.  Or maybe I should say that it would be likely that the modern American mindset would not bring the reality of our wickedness to mind with anything more than a rather generic evaluation that goes like this: “I’m a sinner, but I’m not the worst sinner there is.”

   The comparison to some other worse sin or worse sinner completely under cuts the drive that ought to characterize our Christian striving.  That type of thought reveals a rather soft, even limp, sense of the high degree of our calling and the horror that sin is in the eyes of God.  No wonder that we can often settle for a comfortable discipleship, one that, when it comes down to it, is rather easily accomplished without much effort.  This poor excuse for Christian vitality becomes all the more stark when we consider the length the modern American goes for other pursuits.  Would anyone call himself a fan of a team if he only showed up to the team events a couple times a year?  The modern American would sniff out that lie immediately.  But somehow being an active part of Christ’s Body the Church only every so often doesn’t strike some modern minds as being less than fully Catholic.  Would anyone who doesn’t train for a sport with serious dedication expect to be a starter on the team?  Absolutely not.  In fact, you’d probably be kicked off the team.  But somehow a soft discipleship that doesn’t really develop prayer, confess sin frequently, or follow Church teaching seems to be enough to get into Heaven in some minds.  Have you noticed how every modern American funeral assumes the deceased person is in Heaven, and theologically worse, assumes the person is now an angel who “got her wings”?  I have never once been to a funeral where I heard it said, “Well, we should pray because he’s probably in a worse place now.”  Now, I’m not saying we should assume Hell.  Don’t get me wrong.  But, assume Heaven?  How often might we hear excuses that seem to absolve a person from serious effort at growing in holiness and battling sin?  “Well, it would be really hard to give that thing up”, or “it would be big inconvenience”.  Really?  Harder or more inconvenient than damnation?  The modern American mindset can risk dismissing the things of the soul in a way it would never do with things of the body.  We can tend to grow lax and slack in what should be a striving that seeks to pass through the eye of a needle (cf. Mt. 19:24).  Thus, do we need a Lent to wake us up.  To shock the system.  To get us into spiritual shape.  And hopefully, being renewed in Lent, we eventually become less likely to fall to the trend of a soft discipleship the rest of the year.

   Our Catholic faith and teaching has a remarkable ability to hold together both the truth of God’s immense love for us and the truth that we are sinners who need to take seriously the call to repent and to convert in order to be fully alive here and to have eternal life in Heaven.  When we speak clearly and admit that we are sinners deserving punishment, we are not downplaying God’s love and saving desire for everyone He has made.  When we speak clearly and admit that God has made us for Himself and He offers mercy to all, we are not obscuring the fact that our sin is real, it does real harm, and it is deserving of punishment.  Both are true and we hold up both at one and the same time.  Lent is a time to uncover the unintentional, weak attitudes that sometimes lull us into being miserably out of spiritual shape and discipline.  God loves us.  And we are sinners.  We do not presume God’s mercy by treating sin lightly.  We also do not despair of salvation by thinking God unable to save us by His rich grace.  We begin today, the collect said, a “campaign of Christian service” by taking up “battle against spiritual evils” “armed with weapons of self-restraint.”  By faith and baptism we are drafted into this campaign and we should be ready to wage war.  May the Lord bless our efforts and may His holy angels protect us in this season of battling the forces that pull us away from His generous love.