Part I
Today is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Lent is a season for deliberate self-inventory and communal reflection as it relates to the incarnation of faith, hope, and love. I like to remind people that the ashes Christians “receive” today are not just carelessly smudged on us as if they were a Rorschach inkblot open to interpretation. They are traced on our foreheads in the shape of a cross. Whereas it is the ashes that are the sign of our mortality and incompleteness, the cross paradoxically is the sign of new life and new possibilities. This point is emphasized at the culmination of Lent in the Triduum liturgy which begins with the entrance antiphon on Holy Thursday as taken from Galatians 6:14: “We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is our salvation, our life and our resurrection; through him we are saved and made free.”
Together, the substance and the shape, the ashes and the cross, signify the two-fold nature of Lent: penitential and baptismal, remorseful and trusting, reflective and yearning, patient and hopeful. The internal movement of Lent incorporates and alludes to the movement of the Paschal Mystery which is from purification to enlightenment, from death to new life. Having the benefit of history and the blessing of faith, we can sing of the cross because we know it not as the executioner’s tool of destruction but as the chrysalis that breaks open to the forever fullness of life in God.
Unfortunately, for a long time (until the Second Vatican Council), the scales tipped and the emphasis tended to be placed on the one theme -– repentance—to the neglect or exclusion of the other—baptism. But, as is reflective of the daily dyings and risings in real life, and as is necessary for an authentic spirituality, each movement and reality is essential to the other. The experience of descent and dying that never breaks through to dazzling light, the enchantment of wonder, and the joy of transformation, a Good Friday divorced from the taste of Easter hope, is an endless winter, a cruel joke, a vortex of despair. Conversely, celebration of life that knows nothing of suffering, injustice, and ignominy, an Easter Sunday divorced from the Good Fridays of failure and imperfection, of hurting and being hurt, of the harm we have done and the good we have failed to do personally, communally, and globally, is nothing more than Easter-Lite.
The power and the glory of Easter, the magnificent experience of la joie de la vie is directly connected and responsive to the reality of loneliness and dread, suffering and grief, injustice and evil, malevolence and corruption, and disproportionately greater. Some call this wishful thinking. Those of us who humbly but boldly dare to take the name of Jesus– the one who reveals both what it means to be human and what the heart of God is like, who was well-acquainted with suffering and grief, who was tortured, executed, and rose again for the sake of love as the triumph of love—dare to call it faith.♦