The time to proclaim that God alone is Lord, to drop the pretense of being self-sufficient and the need to put ourselves at the centre of things, to be the top of the class, to think that by our own abilities we can succeed in life and transform the world around us. Lent, then, is the time to remind ourselves who is the Creator and who is the creature. We put on maquillage and think we are better than we really are. God knows this yet we often forget it, and think that we are self-sufficient, strong and invincible without him. Let us listen to those words again: He remembers that we are dust. And he constantly urges us not to despair, even when we lie fallen in the dust of our weakness and sin, for “he knows how we were made he remembers that we are dust” ( Ps 103:14). As a tender and merciful Father, God too experiences Lent, since he is concerned for us he waits for us he awaits our return.

For God “formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” ( Gen 2:7) we exist because he breathed into us the breath of life. As we humbly bow our heads to receive the ashes, we are reminded of this truth: we are the Lord’s we belong to him. With God, we will rise from our ashes, but without him, we are dust. We come from the earth and we need heaven we need him. He is the Creator, while we are the fragile clay fashioned by his hands. They bring us back to the essential truth of our lives: the Lord alone is God and we are the work of his hands. The ashes remind us who we are and whence we come. It exhorts us to do two things: to return to the truth about ourselves and to return to God and to our brothers and sisters.įirst, to return to the truth about ourselves. The rite of the imposition of ashes serves as the beginning of this return journey.

Return to what is essential: it is the Lord. It is the season of grace when we put into practice what the Lord asks of us at the beginning of today’s first reading: “Return to me with all your heart” ( Jl 2:12). Lent is indeed the “favourable time” to return to what is essential, to divest ourselves of all that weighs us down, to be reconciled with God, and to rekindle the fire of the Holy Spirit hidden beneath the ashes of our frail humanity. With these words, the Apostle Paul helps us enter into the spirit of the Lenten season. “Behold, now is the favourable time behold, now is the day of salvation!” ( 2 Cor 6:2).

First imposition of ashes