LET THE ASHES SPEAK TO OUR HEARTS

By Stephen Fields, SJ

Illustration by Stephanie Dalton

     Lent begins with one of the most powerful symbols of Christianity. Following an ancient custom, the Catholic Church burns branches left over from last year’s Palm Sunday and soils our foreheads with ashes, making them black with the sign of the cross. There is something deeply moving about this pious custom. Confronting the Church’s minister face-to-face, we are sternly admonished with words that we never otherwise hear: “Remember, you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” What is it about this smear of grimy charcoal that makes our churches so crowded on Ash Wednesday? From the nursing infant to the walker-assisted elderly, from the pin-striped executive to the homeless of the neighborhood, so many Christians stand together in the same line, all oblivious to the social and economic divisions among them. Year in and year out, they faithfully return to repeat this somber ritual. Year in and year out they proudly carry this smudge of mortality and repentance as a badge of honor out into the streets, back to offices, homes and schools.

      The answer is that the human heart yearns to hear the truth about itself. “Our hearts are restless,” St. Augustine reminds us, “until they rest in you, O Lord.” The truth is, our hearts are restless because they yearn to be free of the distracting pretense with which the world so callously surrounds us. They yearn to be free of our accumulated sins and the guilt with which they inevitably load our consciences. They yearn to feel God’s mercy more surely, to love God and neighbor more dearly, and more nearly to cleave to the power of the living Christ. We seldom give our restless hearts the attention they crave. This is why ashes on our faces arouse such deep feelings in us. They tell us it’s time for the truth to be proclaimed with honesty and without apology.

      Our Lenten ashes give us the clue about how to make the most of these 40 days. First and foremost, they speak of sin. They plunge us into one of the deepest and painful mysteries of human existence. No one describes this mystery better than St. Augustine in his autobiography called the Confessions. He recalls when, as a young man, he and some friends, after being out carousing late one night, stole a load of pears from a neighbor’s vineyard. In looking back on the theft, Augustine in late life wonders why he did it. Neither he nor his companions were hungry. In fact, they didn’t eat what they snatched. They threw the pears into the nearby pig pen. “I stole,” he concludes, “because I wanted to do what was wrong. I took pleasure in doing what I wanted to do on my own terms.” He realizes that the pleasure of sinning was enhanced by sinning in the company of sinners. Doing bad, just like doing good, gets strength from numbers.

      St. Augustine’s story helps us examine our Lenten consciences. Without much effort, we can usually draw up a list of our particular sins, errors, mistakes and poor judgments that, in hindsight, we wish we could undo. Some of these, we see, were due to our inexperience or immaturity. As we become more seasoned, these are unlikely to be repeated. Some were due to the pressures and strains of the moment. With some compassion from ourselves and others, these are readily pardoned, even if they are not condoned. But if we probe our motives more deeply, we will no doubt see that some sprang from a real disorder crouching in the core of our hearts. There we can sense an attraction to what is wrong. When we make a choice to act out this attraction, it makes us feel important. It gives us a taste of power. It gives us control over others. It may be something as seemingly innocuous as idle gossiping about our friends, relations and coworkers. A pleasure comes from showing others that we know something they don’t know about other people. The pleasure is heightened when others eagerly listen. Whether the sin is gossip, or stealing pears or something gross, serious, and mortal, the point is always the same. Sin means that I will make myself the center of my own world. I will shove God’s ways squarely off to the side. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” asserts Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

      Pondering the truth about sin’s infusion into our thoughts, feelings and actions is one of the most important graces we can cultivate during Lent. The Second Vatican Council calls this “developing a penitential spirit.” It is helpful to our moral and spiritual growth and matures us in the virtues of justice and humility. A virtue is nothing more than a good habit that guides our behavior. For instance, if we have developed the habit of courtesy, we will more easily treat other people politely even when we are treated rudely. A virtue makes goodness second nature. When the virtues of justice and humility become good habits, we are better able to understand how every sin of ours gives the serpent from Eden a fresh chance to crawl around the garden of our own lives. Adam and Eve, by pursuing Lucifer’s false light, violated justice. They disturbed the right order between humanity and God. They acted out their pride. Passed down successively to us, this same pride still lies at the core of every sin. A penitential spirit restores the right order. It makes God our center. It replaces pride with humility. Feeling sorrow and remorse, it helps us see sin as the corrosive cancer it truly is. When a penitential spirit deepens, our consciences are more likely to keep sin at a healthy distance.

      Our Lenten ashes speak to us about another aspect of sin – its effects on other people. Becoming more sensitive to these enlivens in us a healthy fear of hurting others, stunting their growth or demeaning their dignity. In his short novel, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, the contemporary American Catholic Andre Dubus writes about the adultery between a woman and the best friend of her husband. She uses the failings of her husband as a subtle justification for her own betrayal. She complains that he is unable to love anymore, “only his work, and the rest is all surface.” He can’t be bothered, she continues, trying to meet the daily needs of her and their daughter. She asserts ironically that he would be generous enough to donate a kidney if they needed it, “but he wouldn’t go to a marriage counselor.”

      These three people show a disturbing hardness of heart about how they have drawn others as innocent prey into the web of sin they have spun around themselves. The wife rationalizes her deceit, seemingly unaware that it makes any recovery of tenderness between her and her husband much less likely. The silent victim will surely be the daughter for whom she claims to care so much. Her married lover lies to both his own wife and his friend. He seems oblivious to the lie’s savage power to tear apart the bonds of trust and loyalty that two families have built up over the years. For his part, the loveless husband’s disordered priorities in life probably stem from a sloth that he habitually indulges. He is just too lazy to take time away from what gives him pleasure, his work, to give mind to those who rightly depend on him. The point is, sin has blinded these people to its hostage-hold on others. Our Lenten ashes point to them as negative examples. They also point to us. Our rationalizations, deceits, sloths and pursuits of love in the wrong places compromise the welfare of those we should honor and respect.

      But knowing is not acting. Yes, our ashes tell us to pray about our sin and to consider how it hurts others. But they also urge us to change. They say, “Repent, and hear the Gospel.” They stamp our flesh with the words of St. Paul that hearken: “Now is the acceptable time.” If we really want to be honest about the meaning of getting ashes, then we will come to one of the great glories of Catholicism – confession. Here we have the blessed occasion to act out what our ashes merely speak. Verbalizing our secrets to another person, expressing contrition and asking for forgiveness is hard. But the rewards are huge. Because the priest stands in the person of Christ, it is our saving Lord himself whom confession leads us better to know, love, and serve.

      Moreover, in confession we can be sure of forgiveness. We can leave behind past regret and remorse. We can leave guilt-free, endowed with a healthy amnesia that empowers a fresh start. Hope for a better future is confession’s lasting gift to us.

      Peace is also confession’s gift. Coming to peace with ourselves and with God goes hand in hand. The noted Swiss psychologist of the last century Carl Gustav Jung would require his Catholic patients to be reconciled with the Church before undergoing psychotherapy. Long experience had convinced him that the primary healer of mental pain is not the therapist. It is the deepened sense of the divine that emerges naturally out of every person’s unconscious desires. When the patient enters into a communion with infinite compassion, the therapist becomes obsolete. In fact, the therapist performs only a modest role. This is gently to lead the troubled person through the obstacles that block a richer consciousness of God. Chief among these is the patient’s denial of sin. Small wonder, then, that confession makes good the Lord’s promise. It gives us the peace that the world cannot give, the peace that surpasses understanding.

      Our ashes also speak to us about doing acts of penance during Lent. One way of heeding their advice is to take stock of where we need to grow in the virtues and then to plan a program. For instance, we might assess our temperance. This virtue makes us adept at controlling our desires for the good things of this created world. It means that we will use them moderately and not excessively. We may detect in ourselves, for instance, a tendency to overeat or overdrink, to sleep too much or work too little, or in other ways to indulge our yen for comfort and pleasure. Our acts of penance should help us restore a healthy balance. We could give up that daily cocktail several times a week, sacrifice that dessert, get up a quarter-hour earlier in the morning and devote it to prayer, or be occasionally self-restrained by agreement with our spouse. We should remember, however, that doing penance is different from giving up sin. The first is an act of love that we are not bound to do. The second is demanded of us. It is not penance, for example, that would separate Dubus’s adulterous lovers. It is justice.

      We might assess our fortitude. This is the virtue of courage. It gives us the strength to stand up for our beliefs, defend our convictions and brace ourselves for friction with others over matters of conscience. We may detect a certain fear of doing this, a certain shyness to tolerate tension when important values need asserting. If this is the case, then our acts of penance should aim to balance our fear, which is the opposite of fortitude. We could write a letter to the editor, or to a congressman, or to a public interest group. We could practice how, with courtesy and tact, to cope with making others uncomfortable when we disagree with them in the name of truth. The journalist William F. Buckley, Jr. once interviewed noted British writer and Catholic convert Malcolm Muggeridge. Hoping to receive support for his own reticence, Buckley asked him whether he was ever able to bring up God, Christ and Catholicism at high society dinner parties. Surprising his interviewer, Muggeridge replied with unhesitating enthusiasm, “Oh, yes! Quite frequently. And you would be most delighted by the responses I get.”

      Finally, our ashes speak to us about mortality. The world would have us deaden this by drink and drugs, by incessant stimulants like cell-phones, iPods and emails, and by prodding us on to buy and consume more and more. The ashes’ dark grit cuts through all these when it scrapes our skin. Starkly, it insists on the certainty that “here we have no lasting city” (Heb. 13.14) unless we face the truth squarely, how can we ever gaze with Mary Magdalene’s joy into Christ’s Easter eyes? Unless we climb hard with John and the Blessed Virgin to Calvary’s bleak afternoon, how can we finger with Thomas’s delight the warmth of Christ’s risen wounds? Unless we stoop low with Joseph or Arimathea into the tomb’s dankness, how can we hope to recognize Him alive as the stranger, as those crestfallen men did on the road to Emmaus? They beheld Him in the breaking of the bread. Their fresh wonder can become our own, especially when our ashes weigh too heavily on us during these 40 days. In the Eucharist this Lent as ever, Christ is always risen. Here He reaches out to clasp our wrist just as firmly as He embraced Peter sinking in the waves. Here He speaks the final word to our restless hearts. Here His own flesh and blood wrap us in the love that has long since already claimed us for its own.

Stephen Fields, SJ, is an associate professor at Georgetown University.