Grappling with our mortality
It’s Ash Wednesday again for those of us in the Roman Catholic faith. If you haven’t ever celebrated this day of abstinence and fasting before, or if it’s been awhile, I would encourage you to make the effort: self-denial of any kind is good for the soul.
But most importantly, as we go up to receive the ashes on our foreheads, we are confronted with that most basic fact of human life – that it ends.
We’d do well to contemplate the line “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Life is not absurd – but our denial of death is.
From the ads on TV to the empty words of our leaders, there is no fountain of youth nor perfect utopia to be found on this earth.
I’m not a subscriber to “life sucks, then you die,” but there’s an awful lot more truth in that statement than in any promotion for pills I’ve ever seen. Of course our denial of death is based in something more profound – fear; though not of death itself I’d argue, but of the judgment for how we lived.
This is the real problem with death: there’s no going back to undo past mistakes, forgive enemies, or beg for clemency ourselves. Death is the unalterable period at the end of the story that is our lives.
In the pages before our epilogue, we must choose how to live. This imputes responsibility – the ultimate responsibility for life itself, our life – and that in turn is terrifying. It’s no wonder we avoid this topic at every opportunity: why be woke to such a harsh reality?
Because a life well lived is the “good struggle,” and it can only be authentically attempted when the reality that life will end is kept in focus.
“Life is difficult, then you die – how will you account for it?” is a much better slogan, and one that is recapitulated today by the presence of ashes and the exhortation to “repent and believe in the Gospel.”
I fully admit to failing this battle order many times; but every Lent, I resharpen my weapons and try to enter the fray again.
Before this turns into a sermon or outright evangelization, I better leave it there.
Whatever your beliefs, I encourage you to get to Mass today and get some charcoal on your face.
You’ll be participating in an act of mourning that dates back thousands of years.
In fact, in a strange way you’ll be attending your own funeral, and it really can be one for your past, if you let the ceremony take its effect.
For in dying to the worst in us, we may start living for the best.