“Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart” (Joel 2:12). We perform these works with the urgency communicated in the First and Second Readings of the Ash Wednesday Mass, and with the purity of heart for which Jesus calls in the Gospel: We need to say “yes,” we need to work at the Christian life, we need to “repent and believe in the Gospel.” During Lent, we fortify our cooperation with grace by the works of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
He makes us like Himself, living His life, loving as He loves, becoming holy as He is holy.Īnd it is one of God’s masterstrokes that, in an almost unfathomable mystery, He leaves room for our cooperation in this process of transformation. God does not merely bombard us from the outside, but transforms the very dust of our earthly selves from within. God’s grace is transformative, and that is one of its greatest qualities. In the Mass, Jesus gives Himself to us as Paschal Food and Drink so that we might have the strength to continue our journey. And on Ash Wednesday we celebrate the Holy Eucharist. One of the major Lenten themes is that of Baptism, which is our introduction into divine life and our insertion into the Paschal Mystery of Jesus. This reminds us of how the dust of our bodies was once washed in the waters of Baptism. You are dust, unto dust you shall return is seen by some as a bit morbid or negative, and they don’t want to think about it. There are many Catholics who lined up to receive their ashes on Wednesday and secretly hoped the priest gives them the positive blessing: Repent and believe in the Gospel. Such power can only come from above.Īnd so, even the ashes with which we are marked on Ash Wednesday are blessed and sprinkled with holy water. You are dust and onto dust you shall return Genesis 3:19. There is no power native to the human race by which we could make the journey from earth to heaven. And it reminds us of the fundamental and transformative difference God makes in our lives. It reminds us of the complete otherness of God’s grace. But Ash Wednesday reminds us of who and what we really are: “dusty” sinners. We are so used to the idea that we’re bound for heaven that we can subconsciously start taking it for granted. And by stages we make our way to Easter, to heaven, to the Resurrection.
So to begin Lent we are marked with dust, symbolizing our earthly origin and destiny. Every earthly destiny converges in the inescapable truth of our bodily death and decomposition. “And to dust you shall return”-Lent reminds us that it’s not only our beginning that’s humble. “Remember that you are dust”-Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with a reminder of our very humble origin in the dust of the earth. Each Lent is a microcosm of our whole lives.