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The Bishop's Journal
March 2000
ASH WEDNESDAY?
Psychologists tell us
that in order to be healthy people we need to be able to mourn. It is
healthy to give voice to our grief. It is healthy to acknowledge the
frailty of our human condition.
This is not news for Christians. In the beatitudes Jesus tells us that
those who mourn are blessed. We know that it is good for us to officially
acknowledge not just the happy things of life, but also the sad. We know
that it is healthy for us to mourn together; to acknowledge, as one, that
things are not as we would wish them to be and not as God intends them to
be.
Each fall I am thankful that we have a national day of thanksgiving
wherein the general public is given the opportunity to officially
acknowledge our need to offer thanks to God. I often think that we could
use more such secular holidays! Perhaps it would be wise to institute
another national holy-day, in this case, an official day for repentance
and mourning.
In the state of Israel, they publicly observe the Jewish holy day Yom
Kippur. Those who have experienced an Israeli Yom Kippur tell me that a
mystical silence settles over the whole nation. Everything stops.
Everything is disrupted as the nation engages in a collective act of
repentance and mourning that acknowledges all the injustice, hurt and
violence that we share as a people, both corporately and individually.
Given all this, it is easy to affirm the value of days like Ash Wednesday
in the liturgical calendar. This, in effect, is what Ash Wednesday is for
the Christian community. It is grieving for a purpose - ritualized
mourning that has a discernable and clear end in sight. On Ash Wednesday
we grieve for the sake of healing. We mourn for the sake of cleansing.
Several years ago, a thirty-two year old man with a long history of mental
illness barged into St. Patrick's cathedral in New York and battered a
seventy-seven year old usher to death at the communion rail. Moments later
he, in turn, was shot to death by a policeman's bullet. The next morning,
John Cardinal O'Connor led the cathedral congregation in a ritual
cleansing of the church, chanting the great penitential Psalm 51 that we
use to begin our Ash Wednesday liturgies. Wash me and I shall be clean.
Wash me and I shall be
clean. As a young pastor in rural Ontario, I was surprised when a
parishioner taught me that ashes are used in the making of soap. How
wonderful, I thought! Ashes, the church's preferred symbol of lament and
mourning, can at the same time be seen as a symbol of cleansing!
The cross of ashes on Ash Wednesday symbolizes both these actions. We
recall the gift of baptism and how through its waters we have died to sin
and then risen to new life in Christ - two actions; dying and rising. To
mourn is to be healed. To die is to live. To wear ashes is to ritually
step towards new life!
On Ash Wednesday we come face to face with the harsh fact of our own
mortality and sinfulness. The trumpet calls and we are marked with the
mantle of ashes; an ancient sign of sorrow. The pastor intones the harsh
reminder. "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return."
With sober urgency we are called to return to God. We begin our paschal
pilgrimage and are summoned anew to the spiritual disciplines of prayer,
almsgiving and fasting.
This is definitely not a party day! But don't think for a moment that this
day doesn't hold special gifts. Pray and watch! Who knows what miracles of
life might rise from these ashes.
The Rev. Michael J. Pryse,
Bishop
