Death takes away all power to act and makes moot all our good intentions.Īs Catholics, we rightfully stress God’s unlimited, unconditioned capacity to forgive our sins. Today - right now - is when we make our choices and take action the present moment is the only moment in which we can show charity and mercy to others, forgive each other, repent, convert our souls, and reach for sainthood. Death is the moment we lose what small power we have to make our lives count for something. Why dwell so much on death? But death is precisely the moment when all possibility for repentance and conversion is lost. This may strike many of you as unnecessarily morbid. You are dust and to dust you shall return. There is no shutting off the mortality gene. Stretch your life out as long as technology makes possible, and even there at the furthest reach of medicine, Death is still waiting for you. The fact that we are living into our late seventies and early eighties is no guarantee that you will celebrate your next birthday in the material world. Nevertheless, I too manage to put off contemplating my own mortality for months at a time, despite my progressing age, increasing medication, and decreasing flexibility.īut you are going to die, whether you think about it or not. (So long as I live, I will never lose that dreadful memory.) Since then, I have lost many friends and family to accidents, to illness, to suicide, and to age. After all, I lost the notion that kids are exempt from death when I was in sixth grade - a classmate was abducted and murdered. I would love to say I never had that luxury. As for dying tomorrow in an auto accident, or being shot down in a mall by a mass murderer while shopping for Nikes, or catching some horrible, incurable disease like Ebola … well, the probability of Death catching us unawares like that seems to be vanishingly small, despite its omnipresence in the news. Well, yes, it will happen to us, too, sometime in the distant future, after we have become old and useless - a future that some scientists believe can be made very distant very soon. Of course, no one goes so far as to deny that death is a real thing. But to deny or minimize death is not the same as to affirm life.
Like the “resurrectifix” one sometimes finds at certain churches, its silence about our mortality treats sin and death as if the Resurrection made them unimportant, even irrelevant to the gospel narrative.
But there is a reason for the Ash Wednesday rite, a reason the first prayer, with its un-spiritual concern for the purity of our minds, seemingly does not comprehend. Indeed, “Repent and believe the good news” was the cry of the first evangelists. I don’t have a real problem with the injunction to repent and believe. The first blesses the faithful “that, as they follow the Lenten observances, they may be worthy to come with minds made pure to celebrate the Paschal Mystery of your Son.” The second, more traditional one blesses the ashes “that we, who acknowledge we are but ashes and shall return to dust, may … gain pardon for sins and newness of life after the likeness of your Risen Son.” The order in which the Missal gives the options is instructive, for the more traditional prayer and injunction are put in second place, almost (but not quite) as a grudging concession. There are also two options on the blessing. But the Roman Missal gives the priest an option: he can say instead, “Repent and believe in the gospel.” “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” These are the traditional words with which the priest traces the ashes on the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday.
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