Ashes

Pat McDonough
February 15, 2010

A friend of mine recently recounted the experience of watching his house burn to the ground. The good news is that no one was hurt. The bad news: everything that the family owned was lost. Life as they knew it had been reduced to ashes.

Feelings of helplessness and vulnerability overwhelmed him, but in the months that followed the fire, he was also overwhelmed by the goodness of neighbors and the generosity of friends. “When everything I owned was gone, and I had nothing to call my own but the ashes at my feet, my worldview changed completely. I was less distracted and much more focused on things that I had overlooked prior to that point in my life. I understood, perhaps for the first time, the concept of community, of inter-dependence, and our shared dependence on the grace of God.”

Without knowing it, my friend summed up the meaning of Ash Wednesday, the arrival of forty days focused on our conversion from sin and solitary thinking to compassion and Christian community.

Think back to 9/11. Images of towers tumbling while thousands of people, covered in ash, fought for their lives. These imagess evoked a worldwide response of compassion and communal thinking. On that day, we knew with certainty that life was much more fragile than we ever imagined. If steel towers could fall and human lives evaporate in seconds, then the Good News of Jesus Christ is needed more urgently than ever before. the rest image

Found at Lent and Beyond's Ash Wednesday post