Ash Wednesday Reflection #3

For many Christians Ash Wednesday is an important day. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Methodists…all across the spectrum of the Christian faith, the faithful will be getting will be getting ‘ashed’ as it is called.

The cross itself has rather surprisingly become a fashion accessory, from the plain flat cross of Kylie to the big gold chunky ones adorning the celebrity neck of Madonna.

But the cross we will wear this evening is different. This is the real thing, the genuine article…this is the true cross and with it comes true meaning.

For me Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when I have to come face to face with my own mortality.

Now the thought of death and dying is a really scary one for me. When I was young and the cold war was in full flow. I was told at school that the Russians had nuclear bombs pointed at Kingston because of a company called British Aerospace;  

It had some sort of weapons research project and therefore was a target in the event of a nuclear holocaust or as it was known as an all out thermo nuclear war. Both my brother and dad worked there.

So of course this troubled me greatly and I had worked out that I would be vaporised, turned to dust instantly when the bomb struck (which in my opinion wasn’t too far in the future) – you see I was in the immediate blast zone and of course had no bunker and I didn’t believe that the old duck and cover or painting myself white was really going to help!

I remember lying in bed at night sweating an anxious cold sweat – such joy for 13 year old.

But now I’m a Christian. Maybe I should be blissed out and be looking forward to death, all this with the calm certainty that my ticket to paradise is already in the cosmic booking office awaiting my arrival. Its still scary stuff :¬)

But Ash Wednesday does bring us all to one point. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return’. All our paths now cross. From the drug addict and the tramp to the businessman and priest we are all connected in the sight of God.

When we are ashed the sign is clear for all too see, it makes our hands dirty and maybe this is the reality of following Jesus – you can’t do it and keep your hands clean, you need to muck in with your time, money and energy.

Now I need a volunteer (up steps a volunteer and I place a vertical stroke on his forehead)

The vertical stroke looks rather like a capital ‘I’ doesn’t it. In our world ‘I’ is a very familiar concept. ‘I before we except after me’ because ‘I’ always come first and as our society places more and more important the ‘I’ and less and less on ‘we’ – we are less connected to the freedom that God gives us and with that we are less connected to each other.

And when I place the horizontal stroke here the ‘I’ is wiped away and what is left in its place…the cross and the love of God.