Ash Wednesday Reflection

By Jack Chui

This Lent, I found a fantastic reflection series written by Bishop David Walker from my parent's diocese of Broken Bay (in Sydney's north). I plan to take STAY cell group through the Sunday Reading reflections.

This is the one for Ash Wednesday and I'll post the other guides for each Sunday when the time comes. A copy of the whole reflection (Lectio Divina) Lenten series can be found here: http://www.dbb.org.au/_uploads/_ckpg/files/lectio/Lectio_Lent13_WEB.pdf

Readings for Ash Wednesday (Joel 2:12-18, 2Cor 5:20-6:2, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18)
http://www.universalis.com/20130213/mass.htm

Ash Wednesday

Some of the most fertile and rich soil comes from ashes. Out of these ashes, signs of our mortal nature, comes something else. Once we recognise our own responsibility for wrongdoing, once we acknowledge our mortal and dusty nature, the ashes also become a sign of fertility.

If we are truly repentant, and truly cleansed, and open to the reality of God around us, then we are also fertile, ready to give growth to greatness.

Out of seven years’ worth of ashes on the island of Madeira came one of the finest wines of the time. There is no way the wine could have been produced without the burning, without the ashes. In fact, it was the burning that cleared the ground in the first place.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are, likewise, the burning and cleaning of our Christian lives. We enter a time for confession, for penitence, for realisation of our earthly nature. But this is also a fertile day, a time for self-examination and self-preparation. Today is getting us ready for something.

In The Artful Ashes, Jan Richardson shared what she discovered when she undertook a project where she learned to draw in charcoal:

Taking up a new medium, entering a different way of working, diving or tiptoeing into a new approach: all of this can be complex, unsettling, disorienting. Launching into the unknown and untried confronts us with what is undeveloped within us. It compels us to see where we are not adept, where we lack skill, where we possess little gracefulness. Yet what may seem like inadequacy – as I felt in my early attempts with charcoal – becomes fantastic fodder for the creative process, and for life. Allowing ourselves to be present to the messiness provides an amazing way to sort through what is essential and to clear a path through the chaos. To borrow the words of the writer of Psalm 51, the psalm for Ash Wednesday, it creates a clean heart within us.

Ash Wednesday beckons us to cross over the threshold into a season that’s all about working through the chaos to discover what is essential. The ashes that lead us into this season remind us where we have come from. They beckon us to consider what is most basic to us, what is elemental, what survives after all that is extraneous is burned away. With its images of ashes and wilderness, Lent challenges us to reflect on what we have filled our lives with, and to see if there are habits, practices, possessions, and ways of being that have accumulated, encroached, invaded, accreted, layer upon layer, becoming a pattern of chaos that threatens to insulate us and dull us to the presence of God.

Have you settled on a Lenten discipline? Are you thinking of making room for silence in your life? What are you thinking about for this Lent? What needs to be added to your life? What could you do without?