Ash Wednesday 2005 - Bill O'Malley Here is what Fr. Bill O'Malley - who gave our day retreat in September - will address to his students at Fordham today about Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday 2005 - Bill O'Malley
When I was your age, back when I shooed hairy mammoths from pooping on our lawn, being Catholic was simpler than now. The Church had a lot of spooky things we've now seen are more superstition than genuine religion, but at least they pointed in the direction of the mysterious and other-worldly, which we've also managed to lose.
We had symbols that really meant something, in the same powerful way a driver's license still holds an invisible power for you. We had scapulars (which you've probably never heard of), religious medals we wore with pride, devotions like benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, novenas and missions you'd no more think of missing than your mother’s birthday.
But now, most of that thicket of comforting customs has vanished. Catholics moved into the mainstream of society. But you can't blend in and not be seriously diluted, homogenized, unrecognizable from "everybody else." Only two symbols I can think of that still have some kind of potency: palms the week before Easter, and the ashes made from those palms Ash Wednesday. Trouble is, like all those other symbols, the symbolism palms and ashes carry has been diluted, so they don't really mean what they used to.
Reflect on it a minute. Isn't it true most of us get ashes, not because we're thinking, "Remember, you are dust, and into dust you shall return," but just a big black smear to show you're different. And not different because you're Catholic and people with clean foreheads are not. But that you're just...well, different, not-a-nothing, not dismissible, the way a Nautica sweatshirt or a spiked hairdo or an earring says, "Take that, whoever you are who thinks I'm nobody." The disheartening truth, of course, is that, without exception, none of them is thinking about you at all. But it's a comforting delusion.
It also can be an odd priority. One Ash Wednesday I was coming over to Prep, and a lady asked where she could get ashes. I said she was lucky. There was a Mass right then in the college church, and she could get ashes. And she said, "I don't want to go to Mass. I just want ashes." Something wrong with her priorities, at least to my mind.
So I guess my task today is to crack open the symbol and point out to you why Catholics identify their basic beliefs today (however thinly felt) with ashes. Remember that the palms that were burned to make these ashes are the same palms that recall Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem. They're a symbol of the approval of the crowd. And 'psst!' now they're burnt, filth, disappeared into dust, just as all the peer- approval you yearn for will look pretty worthless next February. They're the ashes of Super Bowl rings and Oscars, Donald Trump's stock portfolio, all the doctoral dissertations, my own 32 published books. Pfft! All the things you can't take through the door of death ultimately end up in the ash heap. And that's what Ash Wednesday is all about, m'friends. Death's commentary on our values. And a declaration of what we think (whether we mean it or not) is really important. The Church puts ashes on our foreheads in the hope their significance might penetrate the skull behind them into our minds and hearts and souls.
Roman generals, home from the wars with all their spoils, were given a triumph, to ride in a chariot through the cheering crowds to show them off. But the wise Romans also decreed that, with him in the chariot, holding the victor's crown over his head, was a slave boy incessantly whispering, "Memento mori" - "Remember, you're going to die."
But, I strongly suspect, death isn't really real for you guys. So how could this ceremony feel meaningful? By the time you're in kindergarten, you've witnessed more deaths on the tube than a veteran in the army of Genghis Khan. Cowboys, Indians, mob hitmen, Iraqi children, video game mutants. And death happens far away, someplace else, to other people. All meaningless.
But if you never are forced to wrap your head around the inevitable fact of your own inevitable death, you never appreciate your life. You think you have an endless supply so you can squander it. Nope. Nobody gets out of here alive. What's more, your death is not only inevitable but (except for suicides) unpredictable. Two-thirds of US males your age will live to their late 70's. But that suggests to people who dare to think that one third will not. And who's to say which group you're in? Even more upsetting, your death makes everything that went before it unchangeable. That means, there'll come a time when it's too late to say, "I'm sorry," so it's a good idea to say that before you go to bed every night.
Death's a very negative reality, but 'paradoxically' fully grasping the fact of your own death can have enormously positive results, which is what Ash Wednesday is for. Accepting death shows you the value of time, especially if this could be your last month - and who says it couldn't? Death realigns all your priorities, too. Getting turned down for a date, or losing a game by a couple of points, or developing a few zits aren't really as tragic as they might appear, and what people would think if you kissed your Mom and Dad at Mass at the greeting of peace seems to get values topsy-turvy when you understand you have them only on borrowed time.
Remember, you are dust, and into dust you shall return. But...but not all of what you are. Because of what Jesus Christ did for us, we also profess today that the most important element in us - who we truly are 'our souls' will survive death. What we make of our selves (and that's what Fordham Prep is all about) will make it through those forbidding doors, and - at least today, at this ritual, we have the privilege to ponder just what we want to make of those selves.
How can you value resurrection from death, when you've never felt appreciation for what death means? And how can you have the slightest notion what Christianity means, when Christianity's all about resurrection?
It's a privileged moment. Don't let it slip through your fingers. |
