Ash Wednesday  puts  a cross on our foreheads. This morning, the whole Jesuit retirement community was at Mass, and a lot of our neighbors from the other side of the retirement home, too.   We all got ashes on our foreheads. It was devout and moving.

Its not a new practice. For centuries –in Britain around 1000, , for instance, “ashes were strewn on the head” of believers on this day.  So it’s  not something Vatican II invented, though the neat sign of the cross on the forehead is now how it started.  

It’s roots are pretty deep.  In the very beginning, this is what God said to Adam and Eve, who brought this on themselves: Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you will return . Or as we used to say in the novitiate: Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverim reverteris (Gen.3:19).

Yes, were going to die. But this was not God’s idea at all, as the Book of Wisdom has pointed out since the Old was about to turn to the New Testament: For God did not make death and does not rejoice in the destruction of the living (1:13).

God did not make death. It’s good to be mindful of death. But we are created in the image and likeness of the living God, who did not make death.

So maybe this Lent, wed do well to concentrate on the living around us and even those far away.  And we’d do especially well to  get up in the morning rejoicing in the day and raising our voices in praise and thanks to the God of the living.  

We’re really blessed to know that ashes are a very temporary passage.