Ash Wednesday
I've been reading St. Mark's Gospel over the last couple of weeks. The shortest of Gospels, it was probably the first one to have been written, probably just a couple of decades after Jesus' death and resurrection. The narrative in the Gospel is pretty raw, without many embellishments. The reader is taken from one event in Jesus' ministry to another, with nary a pause in between. The original Greek of the gospel is pretty unsophisticated too, according to those who are more familiar with 1st century Greek. The very events in Jesus' ministry too are very raw: He uses spit and dirt to restore sight in a blind person, He rebukes His disciples (multiple times) in the harshest and unrestrained language, and He saves His worst condemnations for Pharisees and others who opposed His message. These are not acts of some passive, transcendental guru. The Jesus of St. Mark's Gospel is not an enlightened "spiritual" leader, in the New-Age understanding of the term. He is very much involved in the hubbub of the daily life, with all its immediacy and unvarnished reality.
It is with these thoughts that I approach the message of this year's Ash Wednesday. The Church calls us to repent, reorient our lives, and remember the fundamental things about our existence. We are part of the material world, with both ends of our lives fixed in inanimate matter. We are dust, and to dust we return. The ashes on our foreheads, immediate, unvarnished and raw, remind us of this simple message in a very graphic way. It is only when we fully appreciate this reality that we can completely open ourselves to the transforming power of Easter. But before we get there, we need to spend forty days in our own little piece of spiritual desert, contemplating the message that we had just received, and preparing ourselves for even the bigger one at the end.