Homily for Ash Wednesday 2011

Sometimes I think about the many baptisms I have celebrated over the past 40 years. There must be several hundreds. And all the funerals. Many hundreds as well. We celebrate those events with great care and solemnity. At the beginning and end of life we Catholics are immersed in the mystery of the dying and rising of Jesus.

Today we enter into the Season of Lent. It is a time for spiritual reflection on our lives. We begin it by recalling our mortality as creatures. The ashes we receive on our foreheads remind us of our natural destiny as flesh and blood human beings. We return to the earth from which we came. Establishing that reality in our minds we then can appreciate more fully the eternal life hidden within us through our baptism. At our baptism we were claimed for Christ with a cross on our foreheads and were anointed with the Holy Oil, the Chrism. Now we mark ourselves with ash. Has our knowledge of who we are as beloved children of God become as ash and rubble by the cares and worries of life?

Lent then is a time of repentance as we realise how much we may have deviated from our original call to holiness. We repent first of all by making our Baptismal vocation the heart of our lives. We can do this particularly by being conscious of those amongst us who are making this journey to Easter for the first time: Our Catechumens who will be baptised during Easter. They witness to us who are well travelled, and perhaps travel weary, the strong hope we have in God.

Then we can take up the agenda Jesus gives us today from the Sermon on the Mount: we renew our commitment to our prayer, our fasting, and our works of mercy with sincerity. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are special days of fasting and also abstinence from meat. All the Fridays of Lent are days of fasting and prayer. There are many opportunities to show our love for those in need in these days of tragedy and disaster, especially through Project Compassion. And prayer is our daily companion.

Ash Wednesday to Easter rehearses our life. Not the journey from birth to death, but the journey from death to life. Yet there is more. It is not just our transformation or our renewal we are talking about. It is that of Jesus the Christ. It is his Exodus from this life on earth to God that is at the centre of it all. We make this pilgrimage not as individuals but as members of Christ. It is what we commemorate at every Eucharist.

So all of us, young and old, heed the summons of the prophet Joel, "Now, come back to me with all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning." Let us now take up this challenge and believe the Good News.

Fr Graham