Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday
By Fr Michael Casey
Ash Wednesday heralds the beginning of Lent. Each year the Church invites us to look at our lives in a different life and calls us to conversion of heart and renewal of life. This call is not merely a summons to greater fidelity in keeping the commandments — although for some of us that may be a factor. Essentially Lent is a time to return to the heart, to find out who we are before God. This means not only recognising the liabilities with which we are burdened, but also becoming more aware that when God calls us to amendment we are given grace to accomplish the task. Lent is a time for discovering within our own hearts the spiritual resources that will enable us to live better lives, be better people and, in our own way, somehow come closer to God.
Lent invites us to try living differently for a while. It is like living in a foreign country. We are called to move away from the gratifying familiarity of the life we have constructed for ourselves, and live in a zone where we feel awkward and ill-at-ease. Lent is a time of grace when we are invited to return to the heart. Most of us are not rampantly evil; what happens is that we become a bit forgetful of ultimate values in our lives, we make concessions to our principles in order to live more comfortably and then, somehow, we become somewhat addicted to our little self-indulgences and cannot imagine living without them. Year follows year, and our lives become more selfish, and we scarcely notice it.
The season of Lent invites us to experiment with a life less marked by self-gratification and more open both to God and to our neighbour. This can be expressed by the three practices mentioned in the Gospel: fasting, prayer and almsgiving, or by other means we create for ourselves. If such a life feels lighter than our normal existence, it is probably because we are living more from the heart and are less weighed down by enslaving habits whose ultimate effect is to make us unhappy. By stripping off pretence and trying to live in the truth we enter the hidden chamber where the Father awaits us. When we reduce the level of outward gratification and seek interiorly the face of God, we leave behind hypocrisy and gloom, and open ourselves to the peace and joy that are the Spirit’s gift. We taste for ourselves the rightness of living a life less fragmented by compromise.
