February 19, 2012           David Timbs          Index of David's articles

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Lent: from Dust a New Creation

There is evidence from recorded history that people throughout the ages have used rituals of dust and ashes to express human grief, self-loathing and even a deeper sense of being incomplete, unfinished and not fully created. This symbolism of humility (humus: dirt, soil), of matter awaiting transformation to a higher level of being was taken up by the biblical authors of the second Genesis creation story, …’then the Lord God formed the creature of red earth (Adam) of dust from the ground’….and breathed the breath of life into the earth creature (Gen 2: 7).

Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return is a common liturgical reminder Catholics hear on Ash Wednesday and it more than often is a signal for them to take up the old traditional Lenten practices of self-denial and penance. These are perfectly good reminders of our dependence upon the providence of God but they can, all too easily, become narcissistic distractions from the real work of conversion of heart and life. One of the more positive invitations we can hear at the imposition of the Ashes is, repent (convert, turn your life around) and believe in the Gospel.

This is a call to action and to mission. Without Gospel-belief translated into Gospel-in-action the transformation of our broken creation and dysfunctional humanity simply remain virtuality, a pipe-dream without foundation or guarantee in fact.

This more positive catechesis is grounded in the Christian belief that Lent is not so much a time of negative self-criticism or denial but rather of radical hopefulness. Lent is our forty days of meeting God personally and as community not in a dusty wilderness of testing to resist the forces of evil but rather to encounter God who invites us to embrace more fully the Good News of Jesus and to enflesh that conversion in a new creation in Christ.

Carl Jung insisted that we only know who we are when we know where we are. The where we are is a world desperately in need of and crying out for Good News and the hopefulness which springs from it. The real miracle of Christianity is that a tiny group of 120 people, the Jesus Movement,  were so transformed and galvanised by the power of Christ’s Spirit that they went into their familiar world and beyond it to the alien one and changed them.

The gift of the primitive Jesus Movement to its later incarnation, the Church, was and remains the memory that the message of Jesus Christ is not a mere possibility or a barely attainable ideal but a power that has and does work. When Christians remain cocooned within an idealised world with its pretence and promises it demonstrates to the real world that its faith is not faith at all but a mere convenience.

This Lent may well provide Catholics with a unique opportunity to allow themselves to undergo a deeper conversion to the Gospel, to be recreated and renewed in a special way as they look forward to the 50th anniversary celebration of one of the great Easter events in the history of the Church, the second Vatican Council