Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2014

Welcome back to the blog.  Today at Mass, I picked up a Daily Reflections for the season of Lent book, because I think my most successful and focused time on this blog was working off daily reflections.  Even if much of the time it was reacting against them.  I like the look of this one, at least based on today's reading.

It's actually kind of funny that the prayer ends "Helps us to...become, like Paul, your ambassadors", because that's what Ash Wednesday and the day-long wearing of ashes on your face are meant to be, but today was the very first time in my life that I actually felt like I was doing it.  Of course, it's hard to measure a simple reminder that I am a person of faith on an ordinary Ash Wednesday, but it's nice when we can do it simply and overtly.

I was appearing for assigned jury duty that ended up not happening (apparently the defendant took a last minute plea deal), and as I was waiting to be called into the courtroom, I sat next to a woman who asked me why several people had ashes on their faces.  It told her we are Catholic and celebrating Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance.

Perhaps I should have stopped there, but I continued (a touch too brightly, really) that it used to be much more hardcore -- designating sinners in the community, forcing them to wear sackcloth and be covered in ashes then formally expelled from the Church for the season of Lent.  Now we acknowledge that we are all sinners so we all need to repent.  I've always felt strongly about that story, but I've never been quite sure what I feel.

The reflection talks about the difference between an individual sin and a sense of sinfulness, which is a good point to consider personally -- especially with all of this "I'm a good person!" stuff going on in our culture as a defense against, say, an individual act of racism.  That's probably the clearest flashpoint for where it happens -- some celebrity or politician does something racist, gets caught, then does and aria or has a minority friend do an aria on how they are a great person who is not a racist in their heart, so everyone should back off because they are clearly overreacting and persecuting people.  Not wanting to feel sinful -- at the expense of acknowledging an individual sin and being willing to repent.

Ash Wednesday used to be about individual sins.  Now it's about the feeling of sinfulness.  It's about feeling marked and dirty in public.  It's about feeling the fact that you are a sinner -- that you are small, that you come from dust and someday you will be nothing but dust again.

I think that Evil has gotten really clever.  Because the rest of the things that have intruded into my thoughts today have pointed out that the deck is stacked in our world and heavily weighted toward being terrible.  On The Colbert Report, a very smart man discussed how tiny little advantages -- that don't feel particularly unethical in the moment -- that lots of money and big computers can get you is what makes it impossible for anyone else to win over the Big Corporations.  Even the government, and it's killing the middle class.

I'd need to do research to decide if he's right, but I think that's what Ash Wednesday, at its best, would remind us of.  Individual acts of even small pettiness or selfishness add up to a sinfulness that we can ignore very easily.  Too many "end of my rope" dismissals of the students' complaints adds up to me not listening to students' needs and being a bad teacher.  Each individual time I tell them no not out of wisdom but out of weariness is not a big deal, but it adds up to not being an approachable mentor.

Little acts of selfishness add up to a feeling of sinfulness that we don't want to carry because we are good people.  We don't do big, damaging violent sins.  We follow the major rules.  We just take out our aggression on mostly innocent people or take an opportunity to screw someone over if we see it and it doesn't seem like a huge deal.  And we add to the sinfulness of our world.

Today we acknowledge it.  Today we wear ashes that acknowledge that we are sinful.

And it's hard, and we look away, and a lot of people wear the ashes with pride, to show their faith and piety, true.  It's bigger than Christmas in the Catholic Church.  When I talked to the woman at the courthouse, I couldn't say that it reminds us that we are all sinful, I said it reminds us that we are all imperfect.

It was a small act, not even enough for a proper sin by most definitions, but it increased the amount of self-preservation at the expense of clarity and truth in the world.  It wasn't a sin, perhaps, but it was sinful.

We don't like sinfulness.  You can't repent for it unless you are willing to fundamentally change your life -- not just swear off this one thing you did once and don't want to do again.  It's hard.  It's like ashes in your heart.

Wear them on your forehead with pride, we are asked one day a year.  Wear the ashes, acknowledge the sinfulness and not just the individual sins.  Acknowledge you need help.  Acknowledge you are part of the sinfulness and unfairness of the world as it is currently built.  Acknowledge that you contribute to racism and sexism and bigotry in dozens of small, nigh-undetectable ways and that you should stop.  That you should stop standing by when tragedies happen around the globe as well as in your backyard.  It's not a sin not to send money to Syria or the Philippines to help those who are dying there.  But the fact that there's not enough aid money to help 2.4 displaced refugees is sinful.  It's a sin on our world.

Ash Wednesday is about acknowledging not our individual guilt but the guilt that we share.