We begin the season of Lent with ashes on our foreheads.

 

What does this smudging symbolise? The heart understands better than the head. More people go to Church on Ash Wednesday than on any other day of the Year., including Christmas. The ‘phone in the chapel house will bear this out with the repeated calls each asking the times of Masses today.

 

Why are ashes so popular? Fr. Ronald Rolheiser OMI, believes that ashes are blunt and speak the language of the soul. Something inside each of us knows exactly why we come forward to receive ashes on our forehead. “ Dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return;  No Doctor of Philosophy is needed to explain this to us.

 

To put on ashes, to sit in ashes, is to say publicly and to yourself that you are in a reflective, in a penitential mode of thought, that this is not “ordinary time”  for you, that you are grieving some of the things you have done or lost, that some important work is going on silently inside you. You are, in both metaphor and reality in the cinders of a dead fire, waiting for a fuller day in your life.

 

All of this has deep roots. The human soul knows that every so often we must make a journey of descent, be smudged, lose our shine and wait while the ashes do their work. All ancient traditions tell of persons having to sit in the ashes before being transformed. The story of Cinderella reveals this truth. In this story there lies the theology of Lent, a period when we are invited to sit still while the ashes do their work in us. 

Dear God,

I know that every journey

begins with a first step.

Be with me today as I take this step

at the start of my Lenten journey.

 

 

I begin this journey

with the sign of ashes

on my forehead,

reminding me

that this is no ordinary walk.

 

 

Today with this first step,

I move one step nearer

to the promise of your light.

Today with your help,

I will find new meaning

in the Easter that awaits us all.

 

Thank you, Lord.

Amen

May the Spirit, which inspired the composition of your Word in the Old and New Testament, inspire my understanding of it - and also the application of it in my life; for I am writing a gospel a chapter each day by the things that I do and the words that I say.

People read what I write whether it’s false or it’s true, so what is the gospel according to you?

In his Lenten Message of 2007, Pope Benedict wrote,

“On the Cross, it is God himself who begs the love of His creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us.” 

 

In reading the story of the encounter of Jesus with the Woman of Samaria — the woman at the well — [John 4: 5-42] we find confirmation of His thirst for the love of every one of us.

In this encounter the Beloved Son of the Father reaches out to the Samaritan woman, a woman with a bad track record who was so despised by respectable people in the town where she lived that she had  to go for water in the worst heat of the day when she knew that no one else would be  present. When she meets Jesus and he engages her in conversation she offers excuse after excuse for them not speaking to one another and each excuse is rejected by Jesus. There is nothing about her that would cause him not to engage with her. He leads her to ask him for the Living Water AND wins her over by disclosing his knowledge of her whole life.

 

She declares to the townspeople: “Come, and see a man who has told me all the things whatsoever I have done. Is not he the Christ.”

 

“Behold I stand at the door and knock; if anyone shall hear my voice and open the door to me, I will come to them.”  [Revelation 3:20]

 

Jesus is thirsty for the love of each one of us for in spite of our unworthiness we are precious in his eyes.