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Ashes and Roses
by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

My mother called me over the weekend to tell me that my Valentine’s Day gift would arrive late this year.  Usually she sends some delicious chocolates, which I love.  This time, however, a late-arriving package might be an instrument of torture since today is Ash Wednesday and I’ve now said farewell to sweets until Easter.  (After all, it wouldn’t really seem like Lent if I could eat chocolate!) 

This year’s sudden jump from Valentine’s Day to Lent might seem shockingly abrupt.  To the world, Ash Wednesday is the antithesis of Valentine’s Day: no festivity, no joy, no chocolates, no roses – nothing but ashes.  (The Mardi Gras carousing in New Orleans ends promptly at midnight on Fat Tuesday, I’m told, which no doubt also seemed bizarre to many of the unchurched revelers who thronged the French Quarter this week.)

To the Church’s scorners, Ash Wednesday makes clearly visible Christianity’s hatred of the body, its poisoning of joy, its deep suspicion of pleasure.  As Pope Benedict has put it, “doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life?”  Doesn’t she “blow the whistle” just when eros offers us an ecstasy that transcends, if only for a moment, the limits of this world?  Valentine’s Day (they might say) celebrates this highest hope of joy; Ash Wednesday negates it. 

The truth in Valentine’s Day is the great promise of love – a promise of infinity, of eternity, of “a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence.”  Left by itself, however, Valentine’s Day can lead to two contrary illusions.  Those yet untouched by the disappointments of this fallen world expect to meet The One, the Perfect Match, the True Love who completes them, and then live happily ever after.  Too bad it’s so hard these days to find a human being without faults.  It is also all too common to encounter the opposite illusion, the disappointed lover whose hope has given way to a dark cynicism: “True Love is probably impossible, so I’ll settle for good eros.”

Ash Wednesday is the antidote to these two potent poisons tipping Cupid’s arrows.  Far from negating joy, the Great Fast of Lent is in its service.  We abstain today not because we despise the body, but precisely because it is so important.  Our fallen human nature is wounded by concupiscence – by desires gone awry and out of proportion to our true good.  Our true happiness depends on the training of our desires and the healing of that wound.  Besides, an undisciplined eros degenerates into selfish pleasure-seeking that yields not ecstasy but boredom.  Fasting is that training for our desires, so that they will aim at what will truly satisfy.
 
And what should we desire?  Not merely the perfect romance, but Love Incarnate.  Jesus is he, of course.  But when that True Love came into our world, he traveled a desert road and ended on the Way of the Cross.  He teaches us that there is no such thing for us as a love without need of discipline and purification.   There is no true or lasting ecstasy without the cross.  And so we enter the desert of Lent.

It is God who teaches us the Way of the Cross that we begin again today.  He it is who moves us to fast.  And by the power of his grace, the barren desert blossoms and bears fruit. 

And so Ash Wednesday is not principally about ashes, but about the marvelous work of God that, through the grace of Christ crucified, through the Way of the Cross, refashions the dust of our natures to radiate with the glory of the resurrection.  And that’s more delightful that the best Valentine’s chocolates money can buy!

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)