Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday derives its name from a powerful ritual that reminds us of a mortality. We are confronted by our mortality in order that we take seriously the short time allotted to us here on earth. As we journey towards Calvary this Lent together with the Lord, we start the journey of Lent remembering that life is more than just what the flesh has to offer. We focus ourselves on death knowing that this can be good news.

When someone dies in our culture – we take all the furniture out of the house, we clear everything out in order to make space for the funeral, for the mourners – so that the funeral will take first precedence in our homes. Everything is organized around the funeral. When we move out all the sofas, the cupboards and the tables, we will perhaps find stuff, keys, money that we had been looking for, or perhaps an old photograph that reminds us of an important friend that we have neglected. When we also move out the furniture, we will find a lot of cobwebs, dead insects, spiders, cockroaches, half-eaten jiggies, nzungu etc. A funeral gives us the chance to clean out our houses and make them respectable and inviting for the mourners who will come to support us in our time of grief. This is exactly the same for Lent – we are called to clean out our houses so that they can be made habitable again. The way that we clean out our houses is through fasting – now I’m sure that we all know that fasting doesn’t necessarily meaning giving up something like meat or beer or something like that. I think, if we take the example of what we do at a funeral – what fasting it meant to do is to declutter our lives so that we can create more space in our lives to focus on what truly matters. So ask yourself, what is cluttering up your life unnecessarily? Where do you waste your time frivolously? Is it by surfing the internet aimlessly, scrolling endlessly through your Facebook or Instagram feed? That’s probably what you need to give up for Lent – to declutter your life so that you can focus on what truly matters. Fasting is about creating freedom from… we are increasing our freedom, by distancing ourselves from those things that can come to dominate our live and thus threaten our freedom. Perhaps instead of scrolling endlessly through your Facebook feed, you will instead decide to use the free time you have gained to reach out to a friend or a relative that you haven’t spoken to in a while – just like at a funeral.

At a funeral we empty out our houses in order to focus on what is truly important – many people erect a photo of the beloved person who has died. We empty the house, freedom from, in order to gain freedom for – the freedom to focus on the essentials. This is where prayer comes in. The focus of our lives should be on God and God’s will for us. Prayer helps us to bring this into focus. So this is why during Lent we try to increase the amount of time that we dedicate to prayer. There is no use emptying our house through fasting, if we are never going to be home in order to benefit from that emptiness. We declutter our lives in order to be able to focus on God. Whatever we were doing, or had planned to do stops and for a few days, perhaps even a week, everything revolves around the funeral. This was also the origin of Lent. The origins of the season of Lent lie in the preparation of the catechumens who would be baptized at Lent. This preparation, like it is today for the RCIA was quite a long one often lasting years. Ordinarily these catechumens would have to attend lessons once a week, and then participate in the liturgy of the Word (they were not allowed to participate in the liturgy of the Eucharist). But during the 40 day period before Easter, they would meet daily to mediate upon the central mystery of our faith, a mystery that is known as the Pascal mystery. During this intense period of preparation, they would be called on to ready their hearts to be plunged into the death of Christ in order to rise with him to new life on Easter Sunday. It was this preparation of the catechumens over the 40 days preceding Easter that gave rise to what we now know as Lent. During Lent, we are given the opportunity to focus on what really matters and recall our own baptisms, when we were plunged into the death of Christ in order to live with his resurrected life.

At a funeral too, we often see people, friends and family that we have quarreled with and perhaps vowed never to speak to again. At a funeral we put aside these differences and realize that what unites us is far more important. Funerals are great times of connection, even though we are sad, we are consoled by the presence of everyone around us and reminded that this is what life will be like when we are heaven, where there will be no more separation and no more need for goodbyes. The third pillar of Lent – almsgiving encourages us to create connections between ourselves and others through a helping hand. Some people think that almsgiving is all about putting money into a box at our local parish in order to feed the hungry. This is important, but this is not the main function of almsgiving. At Christmas we all know that what is most important is not the gift we receive, but rather the relationship it establishes between the giver and the receiver. It is supposed to be the same with our almsgiving – it is all about creating relationship between ourselves and those who need our help. This may be particularly difficult in a time of pandemic, but let us think of creative ways that we can reach out to those most affected by the pandemic with a helping hand so that their suffering does not merely remain a concept to us.