Ashes are sprinkled on our heads so that the fire of love can be kindled in our hearts. We live for so much more, for we are meant to make God’s dream a reality and to love. That is not why we have been put in this world. If I am unhappy with life because I think I do not get enough respect or receive what I think is my due, then I am simply staring at dust. If I live only to earn money, to have a good time, to gain a bit of prestige or a promotion in my work, I am living for dust. From there a question can pass into our hearts: “What am I living for?” If it is for the fleeting realities of this world, I am going back to ashes and dust, rejecting what God has done in my life. They remind us that, as God’s children, we cannot spend our lives chasing after dust.
The ashes we receive on our foreheads should affect the thoughts passing through our minds. You may ask: “How can I trust? The world is falling to pieces, fear is growing, there is so much malice all around us, society is becoming less and less Christian…” Don’t you believe that God can transform our dust into glory? So let us not turn our hopes and God’s dream for us into powder and ashes. We were put in this world to go from ashes to life. It is a time of grace, a time for letting God gaze upon us with love and in this way change our lives. For Lent is not a time for useless sermons, but for recognizing that our lowly ashes are loved by God. So let us take heart: we were born to be loved we were born to be children of God.ĭear brothers and sisters, may we keep this in mind as we begin this Lenten season.
More often than not, though, especially at times of difficulty and loneliness, we only see our dust! But the Lord encourages us: in his eyes, our littleness is of infinite value. We are dust, earth, clay, but if we allow ourselves to be shaped by the hands of God, we become something wondrous. We are God’s hope, his treasure and his glory.Īshes are thus a reminder of the direction of our existence: a passage from dust to life. We are the dust of the earth, upon which God has poured out his heaven, the dust that contains his dreams. We are thus a dust that is precious, destined for eternal life. It pleased the Lord to gather that dust in his hands and to breathe into it the breath of life (cf. Centuries and millennia pass and we come and go before the immensity of galaxies and space, we are nothing. The dust sprinkled on our heads brings us back to earth it reminds us that we are dust and to dust we shall return.
We begin the Lenten Season by receiving ashes: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return (cf. HOLY MASS, BLESSING AND IMPOSITION OF THE ASHES
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