In the evening, I take two buses, a subway, and one train, traversing the northwest side of Chicago to its downtown “loop” and then out to our home in the city’s far western suburbs. Tonight’s commute was a revelation. Everywhere I turned, there were men and women with ashes on their foreheads. Not discreet, barely-visible smears, mind you. With few exceptions, these marks were in dark, fat, no-doubt-about-it crosses. I also walk for several blocks in the city and I’m not exaggerating: tonight about one in four people bore the sign.
For the briefest moment, I was elated by what the beginning of the Lenten fast had brought to the surface. Surrounded am I by a cloud of witnesses! And at half past five o’clock those I saw weren’t all who had or would attend a ritual of ash imposition and solemn prayers. They certainly didn’t represent all those who profess faith in Christ.
Then it hit me: How, in the Sam Hill, have we achieved our present culture while this many leaders and professionals identify with Christ to the point of going to a church and having embers signed on their pates as a reminder that they are “but dust”?
How is it possible that we could countenance—to instance our nation’s defining hardness of heart—the murder of unborn children at the mountainous rate we do, with so many walking around tonight bearing a mark from a holy community whose Lord counts those who but lead little ones astray worthy of the equivalent of cement shoes and a toss in the Chicago River? What punishment awaits those who take their lives?
And another question: What are these ministers and priests teaching all of these ash bearers?
In Revelation, a messenger of God tells the four angels charged with executing judgments on the earth to wait until the forehead of every servant of Christ has been sealed. I fear there would not be nearly as many folks with a mark on their temple this evening if they had to wait for one from the angelic sealers.
“This people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
“‘Yet even now’ declares the LORD, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.’”
“As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”
For a look at how the message of Ash Wednesday can help remedy our culture’s death denial and guilt denial (bad things, by the way), please see Robert Hart’s Remember, O Man from the March 2002 edition of Touchstone.
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