Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday
5 March 2025

 The holy season of Lent is an annual opportunity to be honest – brutally honest – with ourselves about ourselves.  It’s as if we are looking at ourselves before the Lord, as if he were a mirror and we are checking our reflection.  How do we reflect the Lord in our daily living?  Is our image conformed more greatly to his?  Is our reflection of him lacking in some significant way that must be reformed, and even in smaller ways that need our effort at conversion?

Taking up the call to engage in this self-examination is critically important because it is so easy for us to fall into a complacency about ourselves that can result in our adopting self-congratulatory ideas and false estimations of ourselves.  Considering what takes place at almost every modern funeral exposes this complacency and this self-congratulatory tendency.  Funerals are now “celebrations of life” by which most people mean a celebration of the deceased and all of his or her favorite hobbies and interests.  Rarely does one get the sense that the life being celebrated is that of the Lord, lived in the person of the deceased, which would be the only thing that matters and the only thing that saves.  Gone are the days at most funerals when, facing the reality of judgment, the focus is clearly on praying that the deceased person may experience a merciful judgment.  The way most people speak at funerals gives the distinct impression, if not the outright claim, that the deceased is already in Heaven or has become an angel.  And since it is assumed that the deceased is already in heaven, there is little that communicates the need to pray for the deceased person.  In fact, one of the greatest tragedies in modern funerals is that the living are not left with an awareness of the need to pray for the deceased and to accompany and help the deceased soul through its purification.  Rarely at funerals do we hear that the deceased had sins that must be addressed or that we should hold off on claims of instant canonization.  I am not observing this to be nasty, but to pull the veil off of a tendency that undercuts the truth.  The truth is that we are sinners.  The truth is that we exist in a fallen nature due to original sin, which we inherit.  The truth is that we are each guilty of our own personal sins, and sometimes rather serious sins that risk our eternal loss on the day of judgment.  If we don’t face that truth, if we allow ourselves to be medicated by the spirit that is so evident surrounding modern funerals, if we adopt a secular way of thinking, then we fall into the trap of self-congratulatory attitudes by which we think our sins aren’t that bad and that we don’t have much for which we must repent and be converted.

And thus, the importance of Lent.   It is a time to be brutally honest about ourselves.  And if we use Lent well, we don’t keep that honesty only for Lent, abandoning it the rest of the year.  Rather, we continually examine ourselves as a regular part of the spiritual life, and we heed the call to practice that brutally honest self-examination in the gift of confession.  Why do we engage in this honest self-examination and the practices of penance?  Because Jesus himself is the example to us of prayer, penance, and the arduous struggle with evil and the devil himself.  He did so in his temptation in the desert.  Furthermore, he recommends such practices to his disciples.  Notice that in the Gospel selection, the Lord is recommending spiritual practices and telling his disciples how to engage in them sincerely and in a way pleasing to him.  He says, “When you give alms,” and “When you pray,” and “When you fast.”  The Lord assumes that his followers take up these worthy practices and that his followers do them in such a way that does not render them empty by doing them in order so that others see those righteous deeds.

What we do in Lent with particular vigor is not intended to be kept in Lent, as if we would leave behind serious and honest self-examination the rest of the year.  We engage with the opportunity of Lent as an intense time of renewal so that we live the faith in a way more consistent with our calling and so that the coming celebration of Easter will find us living a deeper communion with the Lord who is the only source and hope of our salvation.  The truth is that we need to dismiss the tendency to excuse ourselves of sin and to make use of the great gifts that are the marks both of honest self-examination and honest reliance on the goodness of the Lord who loves us and whose mercy saves those who are humble and who repent.