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COMMENTARY
March 1, 2006
Ash Wednesday
Several times over the years I’ve been a columnist I’ve written about Ash Wednesday. I have also, more than once, used the accident of a column falling on St David’s day to excuse some personal indulgence. This year, by a coincidence that has caught my attention, Ash Wednesday has fallen on St David’s day. Since I am learning to take joy in Lent -- the Christian season of penitence, of fast and abstinence -- let me indulge that joy, and let my reader indulge it with me.It is not a simple joy. Abstaining from customary pleasures is hard, can be very hard, and so can be the shame one feels each time one falls off the wagon -- which happens to everyone who tries to ride against the grain of his habits through forty days and nights. Lenten resolutions are not made to oneself, but to God. Part of the discipline is to get clear in my head that when I fail, I am not merely failing myself. For in the Christian view, I am letting down my sinless Lord, who for his own penance, nailed the sins of the world with Himself to the Cross. Take each failure as the crowing of a cock to Peter; then rise, and return manfully to the struggle. Now, this is not likely the sort of thing you are used to reading in a newspaper. I am immensely grateful to have editors who do not demand that I conceal my “Christian content”; I hope they will continue. At the worst, it is not a dangerous activity. We are not proposing to kill anybody. The “mortification of the flesh” that is proposed can have no meaning unless it is voluntary; just as Christian belief is deprived of meaning when it is compelled. We may proselytize, however, as we have been doing wherever there is freedom, for two thousand years. And also wherever there is no freedom, even there: for at the heart of Christianity is teaching by example, and the example of personal holiness is a freedom available even to a slave. And the freedom that comes through abstaining from evil is built, in the temple of the human body, cell by cell, through penitential acts. That is the connexion between penitence and freedom, between the beautiful season of Lent and the astounding fact of the Resurrection. Through suffering we build ourselves up, we rise; we must not waste suffering. Not only in this central image of redemption through the Cross, but in its echo across every field of human endeavour, has the Western world itself been raised. Democracy came of this, and the tradition of free inquiry, and so many charitable institutions that still feed the world’s hungers, even after we have ceased to honour the religion that was present at their creation. To look into history is to rediscover Christ, in the narrative of the West. And to rekindle the conscience and faith that remains in us, often hidden from outward view, is to embark on that same path of discovery. The self-indulgence of our fat capitalism gets in the way. Not that I find anything wrong with the pursuit of prosperity in itself, with the often self-denying labour of investment and return. It becomes wrong only when we, in our laziness and foolishness and from the accumulation of riches, become the fatted calf; when we mistake the fruits of others’ labour for some entitlement to ourselves. Not only Christianity, but all great religions, have recognized the purpose of material wealth: that it exists in the end to be given away. All recognize the unalterable fact that the enjoyment of material wealth cannot survive our death, and therefore we must prepare to lose everything. To my mind, Christianity alone fully rises to this universal fact of death, from where it stands, on the shoulder of Jewish prophecy. Death itself cannot be good, for it is nothingness; but death may be made to serve good, including the eternal good of the dying. Hence the Christian notion of “a beautiful death”, for which we must prepare all our lives. And by extension, the notion of suffering that is beautiful and joyful. We were told at this season not to be hypocrites, not to wear long faces and moan, or make a showy spectacle of our abnegations. We are taught finally to enjoy, not fatalistically but actively, every aspect of the good; to waste nothing, to use it all. Wisdom emerges, out of this ascetic joy. It emerges to conquer the fear that lies always beneath the surface (and often on the surface) of a life being lived at too great a distance from God. Lent comes hardly too soon, with its opportunity to take stock of the mess we have made of our lives and society. Abstention from self-indulgence is just what we need to regain our purchase on the good, beautiful, and true. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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