Ash Wednesday

When I was a young Jesuit doing my philosophical training, I had a friend who would let me come over to his house and use his high speed internet connection to research my term papers. When he first gave me the password to his Wi-Fi: “End_2055,” I looked at him quizzically, wondering as to the genesis of such a password. “Begin with the end in mind,” he replied, quoting one of Steve Covey’s seven habits of highly successful people. Seeing that this answer did nothing to remove the incomprehension on my face, my friend elaborated: “I plan to retire in 2055 so that’s my target to achieve all my goals that I have set for myself as an entrepreneur.” I was impressed, if not a little dubious about the wisdom of the motivational culture that the likes of Steve Covey represented. But when I thought about it more, this is the exact same advice that St. Ignatius gives in the Spiritual Exercises when he invites the retreatant to imaginatively contemplate her own funeral. Over the course of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius constantly reminds the retreatant to “consider the end for which he is made.” St. Ignatius realized that an excellent way to get the retreatant to focus on “the end for which he is made” is by getting them to think about the end of their life, namely their death and to consider what they would want people to say about them at their funeral, what they would have wanted to leave behind as a legacy.

I think that the same idea is operative in our liturgy today at Ash Wednesday. We are anointed with ashes as we hear the words “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” In the words of Steve Covey, we are to “begin with the end in mind.” We are to begin Lent by focusing on our death. Like St. Ignatius’ counsel to us in the Spiritual Exercises, this is not meant to throw us into a morbid spiral of existential angst. If Christ is the pattern of our lives (Col 3:10), then our deaths should be understood in the light of Christ’s death, which is the end point to which we journey during Lent. Lent is sandwiched between two deaths – the reminder of our death on Ash Wednesday, and Jesus’ death on Good Friday. In between, it is hoped that we will have travelled a journey that will enable us to configure our death with the death of Jesus. The Ash Wednesday liturgy is very stark, confronting us with our own mortality. The anointing with ashes lends the liturgy a certain gravity that makes this liturgy one of the most well-attended liturgies of the Catholic liturgical year, perhaps only rivalled in popularity by the Good Friday service. As we have already observed, both liturgies invite us to reflect on death, the Messiah’s death and our own. The attraction of these liturgies is that death has a way of stripping us down to the bare essentials of life and reminding us of the “end for which we were created.” Being reminded in this way of our mortality also impresses upon us that we cannot continue to indefinitely postpone our response to the invitation God extends to us in the first reading “return to me with your whole heart.” We cannot continue to procrastinate and tell ourselves that we still have time to “repent and believe in the Gospel.” There is an urgency about the Ash Wednesday liturgy that encourages us to make today the day that we give ourselves wholeheartedly to fulfilling the purpose for which we were made.

Beginning with the end in mind is about being stripped down to the bare essentials of life. This is what Lent helps us to do. In order to focus on these bare essentials we are invited by our gospel to do three things, to pray, to fast and to give alms. These practices can lead us to “mini-deaths,” small deaths to our selfishness and our mis-guided hedonistic desires. Lent is a time for us to experience these little deaths so that by the time we arrive at Good Friday, we have been able to conform our “mini-deaths” to the death of Christ. If we have some small share in the death of Christ in this way, we shall also share in the joy of his resurrected life that we celebrate at Easter (2 Tim 2:11).