dominican
Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Ash Wednesday
fter Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Twin-Towers, our world smells of ashes. All of us risk being cremated! Ashes do not mean only the dust of our mortality. Ashes are the result of our collective violence today. They signal our self-destruction. They mark our sin, the very contrary of God’s plan.
But there are no ashes without fire!
The Easter mystery begins with fasting and culminates in Pentecost. The faith always puts everything bottom up: we begin with ashes and finish with tongues of fire! We cross the night to rejoice at the brightness of the day. We go from slavery to freedom, from wandering to the covenant, from insults to forgiveness, from fear to peace, from loneliness to communion, from rupture to reconciliation and, finally, from death to life! Faded beings are called to become lights, ashtrays to become burning bushes.
First o fall, the fast is a time of conversion … We are called to return to life, freedom, tenderness, and compassion! We have to let ourselves be attracted by an ardent love, a joy of life, a passion for mankind, trained in a fellowship which transfigures our life. The Gospel has to burn in the depth of our lives!
We receive ashes, as a sign of humility, as a sign of our human condition, most of all as a sign of the misfortune from which we are saved.
We believe that live charcoal smoulders under ashes; we believe that the flame will rise again. As the world is a cold ashtray which smells of loneliness and old tobacco, it is necessary to set light to it! We have to be a contagious Church which communicates God’s passion, enthusiasm, the flame of the faith, the love which burns without consuming itself, life stronger than death!
We receive ashes, to give up on our multiple deaths and to return to real life. We receive ashes to catch fire. It burns and cleanses all pettiness, lack of vitality, all accommodation with despair.
As white light is formed of various colours, the Easter mystery presents different steps, but only one dynamic. To receive ashes and to communicate fire is the same thing. That means that we choose a way where there is neither dead end nor even death … Mystery of the faith. Receiving ashes, the ashes of the ruins of the old world, makes sense.
United to the whole world, we are called to be transfigured, to be reborn from our ashes, to receive tongues of fire, to become burning bushes! But it is through the fire, in the heart of the night, in distress sometimes, in this suffering which is so close to the victorious cross of the Risen Christ.
Fr. Michel Van Aerde, op
President of Domuni
