By Jacqueline Kelly –
Easter is the greatest of all feasts. We have two periods of preparation for it, called Pre-Lent and Lent. Pre-Lent begins nine weeks before Easter. It starts with Septuagesima Sunday and goes on till Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. Prohibition around milk and eggs gave rise to the tradition of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras [French for Fat Tuesday]. On this day, Christians would feast on the foods they were required to abstain from during Lent.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday. It is a season of sorrow and suffering for sin, a season of preparation for the Passion and Death of Christ.
The word “Lent” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon words, lencten, meaning “spring”, and lenctentid, which was the word for “March”, the month in which the major part of this season of sacrifice falls.
In early times those who were getting ready for baptism would receive special training during Lent; and any of the faithful who had committed serious sins would have to do their public penance.
Lent is in many ways like a retreat, taking us along the path of fasting, penance and prayer, in a special invitation to return to God.
On Ash Wednesday, we receive blessed ashes which the Priest puts on our foreheads in the form of a Cross; the Church reminds us by this that we will all have to die someday, and warns us to do penance.
Ash is the powdery residue left after the burning of a substance. Traditionally, the ashes were made by burning palm fronds which have been saved from the previous year’s Palm Sunday, the Sunday before Easter. They are then blessed by a Priest. This practice began in the 12th century. It was Pope Urban II who called for the use of ashes and later it was called Ash Wednesday or “Day of Ashes”.
“Day of Ashes” is derived from “Dies Cinerum” in the Roman Missal and is found in the earliest existing copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary.
The ashes of palms are used because the palm is an emblem of peace, which comes after combat and victory. The palms were carried as Christ entered Jerusalem, to display his claim to leadership and victory. The burnt palms call upon us to gain victory over sin. Ashes also remind us of Christ whom we must keep in mind all during Lent. The ashes are the remains of burnt things – a picture of the emptiness and nothingness of temporal goods and pleasures.
The liturgical use of ashes originates in the Old Testament. In the Book of Esther, Mordecai put on sack cloth and ashes when he heard of the decree of King Ahasuerus [or Xerxes, 485-464 B.C.] of Persia to kill all the Jewish people in the Persian Empire [Est 4:1]. Prophesying the Babylonian captivity of Jerusalem, Daniel wrote: “I turned to the Lord God, pleading in earnest prayer, with fasting, sackcloth and ashes”. [Dan 9:3]
Ashes signified desolation and ruin, worthlessness and insignificance. It symbolized death and repentance.
“Ashes are equivalent to dust, and human flesh is composed of dust. [Genesis 2:7] and when a human corpse decomposes, it returns to dust or ash. [Genesis 3:19 KJV] In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground, for out of it was thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” but nowadays, when someone dies, they are rushed from the deathbed to the funeral home to be embalmed and to be worked over by a make-up artist so that the “dusty reality” is hidden from us. Their deaths are spoken of as almost an embarrassment; “he passed away,” they say, or “he is no longer with us”.
These comforting but sterile luxuries were not an option in the past when plagues felled so many people that there were not many survivors to bury the dead, when bodies had to be stored all winter until the ground was soft enough to dig, when most of the children a woman bore, died before they were able to grow up. In our culture, with medicines and “funeral sciences”, we are afraid to look at death.
No matter how long science can prolong life, no matter how much embalming fluid is pumped into a corpse, Nature will have her way. This is the hideous Truth. And when Nature has her way, we can either rest in the knowledge that the ultimate Victor is Christ, Our Lord, who walked out of His tomb 2,000 years ago and offers Resurrection to us, or we can believe that decay is all that is left. This is the meaning of Ash Wednesday.
Ashes are used to express the penitence necessary to come to Christ so that we can experience bodily resurrection at the End of Age. [Job 42:6] “Therefore, I reprehend myself, and, do penance in dust and ashes.”
- Their colour is grey, the colour of penance. Ashes have a gritty, cleansing value; penance cleanses our hearts and removes the stain of sin. Ashes are a good fertilizer; penance helps us grow in virtue and bring forth fruits of justice.
- In the Old Law ashes were a figure of penance:
a. When Jonas proclaimed to the Ninevites the destruction of their city, “they proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth”. [Jonas 3:5]
b. King David put ashes on his bread that even at meals he might remember his sins and the need of penance.
Among the Roman Catholics, the custom of marking the forehead with ashes is said to have originated during the Papacy of Gregory the Great [590-604]. As a sign of sorrow and repentance was a practice of the Anglo-Saxon Church in the 10th century. It was made universal throughout the Western Churches at the Council of Beneventum in 1091.
The use of ashes as a penance was a matter of private devotion. Later, it became part of the official rite for reconciling public penitents. On Ash Wednesday, the Bishop blessed the hair shirts which they were to wear during lent and sprinkled ashes over them. Then, while the faithful recited the Seven Penitential Psalms and the Litany of the Saints, the penitents were turned out of the Church because of their sins- just as Adam, the first man, was turned out of Paradise because of his disobedience. The penitents did not enter the Church until Maundy Thursday after having won reconciliation by the toil of forty days’ penance and sacramental absolution.
Ashes served as a motive for Christians to pray for the returning sinner and feel sympathy for him.
Still later, the use of ashes passed into its present rite of beginning the penitential season of Lent on Ash Wednesday in preparation to highlight the act of penance and reconciliation during Holy Thursday which had started by the Order of Penitents. As human beings we need to exercise self-control. This can be achieved only in practice. The Second Vatican Council [1962-65] had given Catholics a more personal approach to conditions of fasting, taking into account the changing circumstances of modern times. To Jesus the internal motive from which an action springs is more important than the external act itself.
Stations of the Cross [also called the Way of the Cross or Via Crucis] is a Lenten devotion that dates back to the 4th century.
Putting a “Cross” mark on the forehead was in imitation of the spiritual mark or seal that is put on a Christian in Baptism. This is when the newly born Christian is delivered from slavery to sin and made a slave of righteousness and Christ. [Romans 6:3-18]. Since Ash Wednesday is the start to Lent, it is also the beginning to focus on baptism- thereby helping us to renew our baptismal promises on the arrival of Easter.
The blessing of the ashes begins with an antiphon and a verse of a psalm begging God’s grace and mercy. Then come four prayers which express what the ashes symbolize:
- To be a spiritual help for all who confess their sins.
- To secure pardon of sins for those who receive the ashes.
- To give us the spirit of contrition.
- To give us the grace and strength to do penance.
After the Priest sprinkles the ashes with holy water and incenses them, he puts some on his own forehead, and then on the foreheads of those present, the head being the seat of pride. Mother Church thus points out that we have no reason to be proud, since we are nothing but dust and ashes.
In case of clerics it is upon the place of the tonsure.
He puts ash on our foreheads in the shape of a Cross to remind us that Jesus died on the Cross for us and that we must take up the Cross and follow Him and as he does so, he says the words of Genesis 3:19 “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
Alternative formula- Moménto, homo, quia pulvis es, et in púlverem revertéris [Remember, man, that thou are dust, and unto dust thou shall return].
We do not respond to these words; we simply return to our pews.
Following the disposition of the ashes come two Antiphons and a Response. Then the Priest says another prayer for protection in the coming combat.
After we leave the Church, we leave the ashes on our foreheads until they wear off naturally from the course of the day’s activities. They are a public witness to those things our society does not wish to embrace: the reality of death, and the hope of resurrection in Our Lord, Jesus Christ.
Note: another [informal] use of ashes in the Church is the saving of ashes from the fire built on the Eve of the Feast of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist [23 June] to mix with water to bless the sick.
The traditions and practices surrounding Lent are varied, but they do have a common focus: preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday.
Ash Wednesday is to remind us that we are mortal, subject to decay and -solely dependent on- Jesus Christ to overcome this fate.
Ashes, a sacramental, are a symbol of penance. The ashes may disappear from our foreheads, but their meaning and lesson must penetrate and grow in our hearts.