Of Ash & Reality

Photo by Thomas Griesbeck on Unsplash

This week, we enter into Lent. It is a time of penance and, as a Church, we entered into this period through the door of Ash Wednesday, wherein we are in both word and deed marked with the dust of the earth, and made to remember that “we are but dust”.

With the exhortation to repent of our sins, we can be forgiven for thinking that our being marked by ash is synonymous with being sorry for our sins, or for mourning that which is dead (namely our old sinful selves). At one level this is true, for from the book of Genesis onwards (e.g. 37:34), times of lamenting the deceased coincided with times of having close contact with ash. At the same time, we can see from the prophetic books such as Jonah (3:5-9), that covering ourselves in ash is also linked to sorrow for sin. In our liturgies, we are given visceral reminders for the reason behind the ashtag. In Lent, we face the reality of sin and death.

Because of our contact with ash, and with it, our association with sin and death, there is a tendency to think of our contact with ash as a morbid interruption to our otherwise colourful and happy existence, what with all that fasting and abstinence. Now, it is true that behind the morbidity, we are meant to be mindful of the time when Christ would come and pierce through the dark veil of death by erasing the dominion of sin through his Passion, death and resurrection. However, the episodic nature of our penance might make us (it certainly made me) forgetful of the symbolic freight of ash. While ash makes us look forward to the saving work of Christ (and so it should), ash should also symbolise a subtler, more fundamental and thus more enduring insight concerning our very condition.

This became much clearer to me when I read Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness. As an aside, Varden is a Cistercian who, late last year, was appointed by Pope Francis to be Bishop-Prelate of the Territorial Prelature of Trondheim in Norway. In a chapter dealing with the topic of Ash Wednesday, Varden reminds the reader that Lent - which we acknowledge through ash - is less of an interruption to our existence than an embracing of what our existence really is. Speaking about the Monk’s relationship to Lent, Ash Wednesday “bids him own his stature before God, mindful of his need, mindful of God’s gift” (14). Lent is less a time to be sorry for doing bad things than a time to be “divested of illusions”. As mentioned in a previous post, sin is not simply a transgression of a law, it is the indulging in a simulation, a departure from reality. In sin, we live a life that is inconsistent with our true self and, as I argue in my book Redeeming Flesh, the heart of this inconsistency is the desire to have no limits, to be contingent on nothing, dependent on nothing, accountable to nothing and thus, impeded by nothing.

This is why I found Varden’s remarks about Ash Wednesday so fascinating, for he makes us notice that in the imposition of ashes during the liturgy, we are not reminded of our personal wrongdoing. Rather, the reminder of our being dust is a reminder concerning our “contingence as created beings” (14). Ash does not mark our depravity, it marks our beginning and end. Thus, Varden sees the injunction to “remember that you are dust” is less a curse, than a statement of fact.

This statement of fact, however, is not simply a clipping of our wings of desire, a cautionary tale about desiring too much. Rather, Varden tells us that it is a caution against being too presumptuous about where our desire for more is founded upon. Insofar as we found this desire for more upon our own strength, we will end up becoming simply reduced to just our nature (17), which is hemmed in by beginning and end. Paradoxically, however, if we begin from a humble recognition of our dependence on the God who created us, God will flex to our humiliation (to paraphrase Varden), and infuse his transcendence into our flesh. It is precisely this confluence of spirit and dust where our desire for more is satisfied, for it is here that the Creator manifests His nature - which John identifies with love (1 John 4:16) - by through the same act of creation which he undertook in the book of Genesis. Our lives then become the tapestry on which an entire cosmos can be painted, one that also corresponds to our desire for more.

Thus, in our entry into Lent, we are not simply remembering our past misdeeds, nor are we simply anticipating the Paschal rectifying of our misdeeds by Christ. Rather, Varden says that we are remembering our present reality, that we are dust called to glory, inert ashes meant to be infused by the plenitude of life by the boundless font of life if we only allow it to be so.