I touched on relationships yesterday at the CNY Mass. Today we can concentrate on the three pillars of Lenten practices which in themselves are pointing us in the direction of relationships. The three pillars of our Lenten practices are praying, fasting and alms giving. Firstly, in praying, we recognise our need for God and that we are nothing without Him. Secondly, through fasting, we discipline our unruly appetites so that our desires can be rightly ordered. Thirdly, when we give alms, we acknowledge our solidarity with other human beings and that we bear responsibility for each other.
Both the Chinese or Lunar New Year and Lent all coincide with the season of spring which is a time of renewal and the three pillars of Lent remind us that our renewal is not exterior but interior. As the 1st Reading suggests, “Rend your heart and not your garments” or according to our translation “let your hearts be broken and not your garments torn”, we are called to renewal. If hitherto we have merely expressed it externally, then it we should let what we do be accompanied by an inner renewal. New clothes does not a new man make.
One of the sacramental reminders we have for the interior renewal called for are the ashes on our foreheads. The formula which many are accustomed during the imposition is rather benign and insipid almost. “Repent and believe in the Gospel”. I might as well tell a person “Go! Be loving”. Whereas the more ancient or traditional formula reads like this: “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return”. This formula lends an air of urgency because queueing up to receive the ashes on the forehead, one is reminded of the time between the reception of the ashes and the time when one becomes a part of the ashes. How much time do we have and what to make of the time between receiving the ashes and becoming the ashes.
The ashes may have come from burning our old palms but ash is ash. What is to prevent us from using the same ashes that can be collected from a crematorium. At the crematorium, the cremains collected are not all of a person’s which if we want, we could use the remaining ashes of a burnt corpse. Therefore ashes are the appropriate reminder of firstly, the contingency of life. Here one day, gone the next day. We are most at danger when we think that we still have time because our life can be snatched away in an instant. The use of ashes is truly a reality check. This leads us to point number two. The renewal should be now and not later. Renewal is not just an event but a process that we enter into again and again. One thing that discourages us is when we conceive of renewal only as an event. As if, once converted, we will remain sinless and when we sin again, we are immediately discouraged. It is a Pelagian mindset which sees not sinning as an act of our own rather than our cooperation with God’s grace.
Actually, our experience of the Sacrament of Confession can illuminate the way we should approach the process of conversion. We go for Confessions regularly because renewal is a life-long process. It is very much like we eating every day to sustain our physical life. Sadly, our self-made philosophy tends to see perfection from the perspective of our machination or the manner we are able to do things. This is reminiscent of the construction of the Tower of Babel. Would it not be nice to be able present (fengxian) ourselves as a complete present (liwu) of perfection to God. Think about it for a moment. Babel, in a way, is a symbol of a self-made and technologically-driven culture which aspires to be independent of God and dreams of being able to look God in eyes as equals. I dare (or I am only worthy) to come (to stand) before God because I have no sin.
What is good about Ash Wednesday is that it is not a day of obligation and yet sometimes we do hear people confessing the sin of missing Mass on Ash Wednesday. So, why is reception of ashes so important even though it is not a day of obligation? The answer might be found in our gut-feeling. We instinctively recognise that no matter what we do, without God’s grace, we can never merit perfection as a gift to Him. We are nobody without God. We are aware of the reality that we are sinner and we measure up to nothing if God were not present in our lives. The ashes on our forehead powerfully remind us of this reality. Therefore, lower our pride and let this Lent be a humble return to God.
