Feb. 14, 2018: Ash Wednesday
Feb. 14, 2018: Ash Wednesday
A bag of ashes costs $5 and supposedly it is enough for 100 persons. So it works out to be a nickel per person. But are you here sacrificing your time and energy just to receive a free nickel’s worth of ashes? I don’t think so. I venture to say that you’re here in this church today because you desire to return to God who is slow to anger, rich in kindness, gracious, and merciful. Perhaps your relationships with family and friends are not where they should be. Or perhaps you want to reset priorities in your life, to regain freedom in areas of your life which you have allowed trivial things or unhealthy habits to take over. Our Lord offers us three spiritual disciplines for Lent which will help us draw us back to God; he also cautions us about the pitfalls related to these disciplines.
First is almsgiving. It’s more than just writing a check. Almsgiving can take many forms. It can be a monetary donation or a work of mercy such as visiting a shut-in, tutoring a child, treating someone with kindness, or even offering our suffering. How about bringing a bag of non-perishable groceries to local food pantries or food banks? And if we cannot do something extra, we can cut back or make do with less in our own lives to benefit others. Caution here is that our almsgiving is to be done without fanfare or desire for public recognition. Our almsgiving is supposed to be an interior act of love because we love God, and we want to manifest his love to others.
Almsgiving touches upon two other spiritual disciplines--prayer and fasting. Almsgiving is a form of prayer because it is giving to God, and it is a form of fasting because it demands sacrificial giving. Prayer opens us up to the Heavenly Father who desire to speak to us and guide us. As we proclaimed in today’s responsorial psalm, prayer helps us to be in the presence of the Father, create a clean heart, and renews us with steadfast spirit of God. The caution for us is that when we pray, our focus should be on God and not on what our neighbors are thinking about us. Our Lord advises us to go into an “inner room” where prayer can become a place of rest and life-giving opportunity for adoration of God.
The third spiritual discipline is fasting. Fasting helps to free our bodies and spirits from the worldly desires that threaten to pull us off our spiritual path. As we learn to do without and make sacrifices on behalf of others, we open up a space to allow God to lay claim again to our attention. It would not be an exaggeration to say that food is an obsession in our culture. Fasting is not dieting. Just as almsgiving without prayer is philanthropy, fasting without prayer is simply a strict diet. Prayer must be the foundation that supports fasting or it may devolve into a selfish act of making us more appealing according to worldly standards. When we feel hunger while fasting, we experience the need to create an open space to be filled by God. This discipline undoes the effects of our sinful patterns, habits, and mindlessness which have overtaken our lives.
As we begin Lent with ashes on our forehead, we ask Our Lord to open the closed doors of our hearts and teach us to love Him and our neighbor genuinely. This is a time of blessed invitation; let us take this opportunity to return to the Lord with all our hearts, pruning away falsehood, worldliness, and indifference.
