THE FAST THAT I CHOSE
The Ash Wednesday liturgy just won’t let us off the hook.
From beginning to end, its focus is relentless. It opens with a prayer that “laments our sins and acknowledges our wretchedness.” After the Sermon, it goes on to exhort us to the observance of a “holy Lent,” marked by prayer, fasting, and self-denial. It reminds you that we are dust, and that one day, to dust we shall return. We pray a whole Litany of Penitence, following which, rather an absolution per se, we hear a prayer reminding us that God does not desire the death of sinners, but rather that we may turn from our wickedness and live. Which is… comforting, I guess?
On Ash Wednesday, we not only hear this message of sin, repentance, and mortality, we embody it ritually. We might enter in silence. We kneel in prayer. We cover our heads in ashes like ancient mourners to symbolize our own mortality.
But the unrelenting message of Ash Wednesday doesn’t spare these rituals of self-abasement. The imposition of ashes is so central to the service that we name the whole day after it, but at the same time, the readings we hear remind us that what we do on Ash Wednesday isn’t really what God wants. Jesus warns us: “Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites [who] disfigure their faces to show others that they are fasting” (Matthew 6:16). Take a shower, Jesus says, in ancient terms. “Put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others” but by God (6:17–18).
Jesus isn’t saying something new. This was the message of the prophets. As God asks us a rhetorical question to the same effect, through the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?” (Isaiah 58:5) God looks upon our human rituals of penitence and lament, and asks, “Do you really think that this is what I want?”
No. It’s not. “Isn’t this the fast that I choose,” God goes on, “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” (Isaiah 58:6) Does God care more whether you give up chocolate, or “share your bread with the hungry” (58:7)? Whether you cover your heads with ashes, or you cover the naked with clothes? The questions are rhetorical, but the answer is clear. If you do these latter things—if you “offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,” God concludes, “then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday” (58:10).
At the very start of the liturgy, we are told that our Ash Wednesday rituals and our Lenten disciplines are not the fast that God seeks. Our piety alone is not God’s vision for this world.
And then we go on to impose the ashes again.
I grew up in a church that didn’t have many rituals. We didn’t mark our foreheads with ashes on the first day of Lent; that was for the Catholics. There was no kneeling or bowing, and certainly no sign of the cross. We sang beautiful, moving, hymns; the sermons were good. But my childhood church was so Protestant that there wasn’t even communion on Easter if it didn’t happen to fall on the first Sunday of the month. Ritual was suspect, in cultural and in theological ways.
But I am an Episcopal priest, and I serve an Episcopal church. I became an Episcopalian in part because ritual works. I don’t mean that rituals “work” on God, as if by saying the right words or making the right gestures we can get answers to our prayers that are more effective than they would be without them. That kind of idea is more pagan than Christian. I mean that our rituals work on us.
And our Ash Wednesday rituals really do work. The smoky smell of real fire from burned palms mixed with the sweet fragrance of the oil of anointing really does work to remind us that we are mortal, and yet blessed; that we really are dust and ashes, and yet chosen and loved by God. Our postures and gestures of kneeling and crossing ourselves really do work to embody our commitment to repentance and our yearning for sanctification. Our rituals of fasting are not themselves the fast that God seeks, but they really do embody our commitment to change our hearts. Our rituals are not arbitrary signs. Their meaning shapes their form.
It can be tempting to take these words from Isaiah and say that ritual doesn’t matter, or even that it’s bad; that the outward forms of religion don’t matter because in God’s eyes, social justice is the goal. But social change rarely results from words alone. You cannot simply say, “Loose the bonds of injustice! Let the oppressed be free! Break every yoke!” and expect real change to come. An especially talented speaker or a particularly hard-working organizer can move some people some of the way with arguments or slogans. But in the end, real change in the world begins with change in our hearts.
Injustice doesn’t end when people are convinced that injustice is wrong, and choose to end it. Injustice begins to end when people feel begin to feel their shared humanity, deep within themselves.
If the rituals of Ash Wednesday are anything, they are rituals of solidarity. They remind us that we are mortal, fragile beings with limited control over the world, who may flourish for a while but who will one day die. They remind us that we are sinners, imperfect people who do not do always do what we should, or even what we want. They remind us that we have not loved God with our whole heart, and mind, and strength, and yet God loves us more than we can even begin to comprehend, and we can smell the truth of ashes mixed with oil all day long.
We are dust, these rituals say, and to dust we shall all return. We are mortal, and we are fragile, and we make a mess of things. They are not the fast that God would choose. But neither are they unrelated, in the end. Because if we really believe these things, they will change our common life.
If we really believe that we are all sinners in need of redemption, then there is no distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving” when people are in need of a helping hand; we are all undeserving, and yet we have all been fed. If we really believed that “Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field” (Psalm 103:15), then we could not allow people who are sick to go without care, because we would recognize that we have been cared for, and we will be cared for again before the wind blows us away. If we really believed the things we say today, we would remove “the pointing of the finger” and “the speaking of evil” from among us (Isaiah 58:9); we would tremble to judge someone else, lest we should be judged ourselves.
And so it is that we gather on Ash Wednesday, year after year. Not because we’re hypocrites who want to be seen to be pious. Not because we’ve betrayed God’s vision of a more just world by clinging to rituals instead. But because this is how we slowly change our hearts. This is how we try to catch glimpses of the new world God has hidden among us. This is how we learn to one day live as if we were no better than our fellow human beings, and no worse; as if we really were all made of dust—as if to dust we would return.
