LENT · THE WEDNESDAY BEFORE THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT
Ash Wednesday
The Beginning of Lent · The Imposition of Ashes · Remember Thou Art Dust
Lent — from Old English lencten, spring · Joel — JOH-el (rend your hearts) · Commination — kom-ih-NAY-shun · memento mori — meh-MEN-toh MOH-ree · Genesis 3:19
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all them that are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Remember that thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return. The words spoken at the imposition of ashes are the words God spoke to Adam after the Fall in Genesis 3:19, and to hear them spoken over you — to feel the cross of ash pressed into your forehead with the priest’s thumb — is to hear the whole of the human condition named in seven words. The BCP’s service for Ash Wednesday is the Commination (kom-ih-NAY-shun) — a recitation of the curses of the Law, followed by a general confession of extraordinary depth, followed by Psalm 51 and the collect whose opening phrase — who hatest nothing that thou hast made — is among the most theologically precise and most humanly consoling in the entire book. Both impulses are true: God speaks the truth about human sin with full severity, and God receives the penitent with full mercy. Ash Wednesday holds both without softening either.
The rite of ashes is ancient — the blessing of ashes and their imposition on the heads of penitents is attested in the Western Church from at least the eighth century. The ashes are made from the burned palms of the previous Palm Sunday: the triumph of one year becomes the mortality of the next, the hosannas of the crowd become the dust on the foreheads of the penitent, the palms that welcomed the King become the sign of the kingdom we carry in our bodies — the kingdom of death, which only the King who entered it can overcome. The ashes are traced in the sign of the Cross: the sign of mortality is made in the sign of redemption, and the words that name our dust are spoken by the one who took our dust into himself in the Incarnation and raised it on the third day. Ash Wednesday does not dwell on death as an end but as a passage — the passage through which every one of the saints in this archive has already passed, the passage through which the Lord himself passed first to make it safe.
The prophet Joel (JOH-el) provides the call to Ash Wednesday: Rend your hearts and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God; for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil. The tearing of garments was the external sign of grief in the ancient world; Joel tells Israel that God wants the interior act, not the exterior gesture. The ashes on the forehead are precisely such an interior act made visible — not a performance for the world but a truth told to God, an acknowledgment made at the threshold of Lent before the journey begins: I know what I am. I am dust. I have sinned. I need the forty days. The word Lent comes from the Old English lencten, simply meaning spring — the season of lengthening days, of the world returning from winter death to summer life. Lent is the Church’s spring: the season in which the penitent soul moves from the winter of its sins toward the Easter of its redemption.
Ash Wednesday is the gateway through which every figure in this archive entered their Lent: every saint who fasted and prayed and examined their life and made their confession and presented themselves before God in whatever brokenness they brought. Alfred keeping his candle clock. More in the Tower writing his last prayers. Ken in his non-juring poverty saying the Office alone. Susanna Wesley with her apron over her head in the chaos of the rectory. All of them knew the dust and the ashes — all of them had heard the words spoken over their foreheads — and all of them found in Lent the forty days in which the desert is traversed and the Passover approaches and the cross is prepared and the tomb is readied for the one who will make of it an empty room. Ash Wednesday names the beginning of that journey with the most honest words available: you are dust. And unto dust you shall return. And the God who made you from dust will raise you from it again.
O God of all mercy, who hatest nothing that thou hast made and dost receive the penitent with open arms; Grant that the ashes on our foreheads may be the outward sign of the inward truth we dare not avoid, and that the forty days of Lent may be the desert passage through which we travel to the Easter that awaits us on the other side of the tomb; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.