Many of us were expecting a beautiful sung Mass tonight at the Oratory, a Missa cantata, with all the trimmings; yet here we are; all you have is a priest going between Porch and Altar…and weeping; but in a way, on Ash Wednesday, it is highly appropriate to be disappointed.
In the reading from the Prophet Joel, the priest himself embodies Israel. When Israel is at peace, Israel cries out and sings. But when Israel is oppressed, it is the priest who weeps, and there is no song.
Perhaps it is a blessing for us to experience such bitterness and the disappointment today. We were anticipating great beauty; instead it is desolate. What a preparation for Lent that is. You see, the spirituality of desolation is one of the most fertile and fruitful experiences we can have; one which will repay us manyfold. There will be time for rejoicing again – and there will be singing again (on Sunday and next Wednesday, in fact) but nevertheless, for now, let us inhabit this desolation. Let us take it to heart. Weep with the priest. Experience that in your soul.
The silence and stillness of a spoken Low Mass also has a unique dignity and beauty which is worth preserving. Remember that the Low Mass was in fact most people’s experience of the Sacred Liturgy before the reforms of the 1970s. Sometimes it would be decorated with hymns – but often not at all. People’s spirituality for hundreds of years was formed by this expression of the Mass: Mass uttered reverently, calmly, quietly, with the priest standing as intermediary between God and man. Sometimes he speaks in hushed tones, but certainly in a language was never that of the street: a language both intelligible, but distant from us. There is beauty in mystery, just as much as there is beauty in intelligibility.
When this priest before you was sent to the city of Rome to study, the first Ash Wednesday was quite a revelation. In the city of Rome are many seminaries. They are often connected to the different nationalities of the men who are studying to become priests there. These men are sent from their home dioceses to take advantage of the Church’s universities, to study with people from across the world, and to be formed in the bosom of Rome, at the heart of Peter’s See. In such a melting pot, the disparate practices of the Church become readily apparent, because all the different nationalities came together in the same place each day for our lectures.
On Ash Wednesday, we Anglo-Saxons and Celts would come with a smudge on the forehead: a smudge of ash, which looked like a Cross once, but by the mid-morning in the humid air looked rather as if we had not washed our faces. This would cause much amusement to our confreres. They would look at us, the English and the Irish, with our smudged foreheads and think that we were doing something quite bizarre. You see, it is not generally the practice in the city of Rome to apply ashes to the forehead in the form of a Cross. That is a northern European practice, one particularly dear in England and Ireland. In the city of Rome, however, it is most unusual to receive ashes on the forehead. Instead, ashes are imposed on the crown of the head; the crown that was anointed with the oil of Chrism at Baptism.
The crown; the place in which you are irrevocably claimed by God, becomes the place where you receive the burnt embers of last year’s Hosanna. For the ashes are made from the palms of Palm Sunday that have been ‘calcined into dust’, to paraphrase George Herbert. They have become something dirty and pesky – a nuisance – something which only speaks to us of sin and death. It is appropriate for us to recognize in these ashes the nature of our sinfulness, what it does to the soul. It turns the Hosannas of our soul into dirt and ash; into something which has no use, something which blows away in the wind.
Therefore it is very eloquent when instead of being smudged, we are in fact showered with that ash. We receive it onto our heads in deep mourning, in recognition of what our sinful behavior does to us. It disfigures us and mars our comeliness. That is not to say that we should wallow in our sins or consider that we have no hope: for having had the ashes imposed upon us, the next time we come to the altar rail is to receive the Lord in glory in the Most Blessed Sacrament. It is because those sins, represented by the ash, have been forgiven that we are able to partake of the Heavenly Banquet, even here and even now.
It is critical that we keep both of those things in creative tension, the ashes of our sin and the glory to which we are called. There is a link between the ashes and the Eucharist – that happy fault – our sin necessitates so great a Redeemer! No one, of course, wishes to receive ashes on the tongue, but it is of course the practice of the Church from time immemorial to receive the Most Blessed Eucharist on the tongue, in that sense of utmost humility, coming before the Lord not to take, but to receive, not to grasp, but to be fed. That experience that the Lord so desires to give to you is only possible with our interior recognition of our sin.
Sin is not a 180 degrees about-turn from God. That is rather subtly to make the mistake of dualism, to think that good and evil somehow are competing powers. Evil does not really exist at all, it exists insofar as it is a privation of good. It is the absence of good, more or less. And therefore there is no power to evil whatsoever. It is simply a lack in us. That lack in us is what we call sin, the object being slightly off course; slightly off target. It is not a rebelling against God, which looks like turning the other way and running 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
Let us not fool ourselves. Our sinfulness is taking what would be otherwise a universal good and making it much, much smaller, so that I satisfy not a universal good, but my own good and my own desires, my selfish needs, putting myself at the center of the world, instead of God where he belongs. For every time that we utter the word Hosanna, let us not forget how many times those Hosannas fall to the earth like ash. On this Ash Wednesday, it is appropriate for us to be desolate for a while, hungry as we no doubt are, hungry for the Lord to restore us again. And then the prophecy of Joel will be fulfilled, bringing the assembly together, the priest imploring, Spare, O Lord, spare Thy people, make us not a reproach; revivify us. The Lord will indeed spare us, and we will not be a reproach amongst the nations. The Lord is good to His word: I will send you grain and wine and oil, and you shall be filled, no more a reproach among nations, but the holy children of God. Rather than our Hosannas falling to the earth as ash, let them rise up again from us to our Father in Heaven.