‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” These powerful words that are heard in the liturgy on Ash Wednesday echo over the years and remind us vividly of our mortality. Large numbers arrive in churches to receive the ashes and many people who live on the peripheries of the Church find their way back, at least momentarily, on this day.
While these words seem very bleak, we hear them because they contain the promise of the gracious mercy of God that is freely offered. Although the path from baptism to death is often full of many twists and turns, the ashes signal that we may be saved and recover the hope that “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you,” as Pope Francis put it in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.
The ashes point to the promise of Easter by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and Jesus’s words to the good thief: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
While talking about death is often taboo and thought to be morbid, many people do want to talk about dying and find comfort in attending a “Death Café”, where people gather to eat, drink and discuss mortality.
As a Church, we have the resources to lead this conversation. In medieval times, the tradition of Ars moriendi – the art of dying well – helped people to prepare for death with prayer, the Mass, the Last Rites and the means to fight the demons and the temptations of despair, unbelief and denial of God. Graphic illustrations show the angels and the devils competing for souls.
The Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales recently launched a website, artofdyingwell.org, which gives emotional and spiritual support in a new, dynamic way to assist this process. To die well, we must live well. Lent offers an opportunity to re-examine priorities and renew in our lives Jesus’s invitation: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.”
The 40 days of Lent create an opportunity to expand and stretch the heart with desire for God so that there is a greater capacity to fill it with the gift of His love. The Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, explained this in his encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi:
St Augustine uses a very beautiful image to describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human heart. “Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey [a symbol of God’s tenderness and goodness]; but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?” The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined.
Prayer, fasting and penance are the three pillars on which this renewal is built. To follow this path will lead to temptation just as Jesus was tempted to his limits in the desert. He did not sin; we rely on God’s grace that we may be spared from sinning but, if we do so, we can return confidently to receive his mercy in Confession.
Fasting requires renunciation because we want our desire for God to increase. While traditionally we fast from food and alcohol, maybe moderation in the use of social media, emails and watching television would create more space for God and our neighbour. Prayer enlarges the heart so that God can begin to fill it. Just as the first steps of a new regime of physical exercise can be painful, new or deeper patterns of prayer require discipline and commitment. The intercession of our patron saints might help overcome temptations.
Christ gives us the model, showing us that to live well we must give ourselves away in love. Almsgiving helps develop a generous heart. There might be an opportunity to donate food to the local foodbank and learn from people on the margin. It may be that a refuge for women needs toiletries and this could provide an opportunity to learn more about the effects of domestic violence or human trafficking.
We might pray against human trafficking and ask the intercession of St Josephine Bakhita, who was trafficked as a young girl, but could say of God’s love at the end of her life: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me – I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.”
It would be wonderful if each one of us could awake on Easter Sunday morning and hear these words echoing in the depths of an enlarged heart that is rich in love.
The Rt Rev John Sherrington is an auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of Westminster. This is the first in our Lenten series written by bishops from across Britain
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