THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
As in previous years, people flocked to churches in great numbers last Ash Wednesday, despite the fact that it was not a holy day of obligation. The atmosphere in churches was almost sepulchral as the priests sprinkled ashes on our heads while he told us that one day we shall die: "From dust you came, to dust you shall return."
Do we need to come to church on Ash Wednesday to be reminded of death? Every day, the media swamp our senses with images of people dying of accidents, murder, calamities, and sickness. Recent statistics show that 2,420,501 people have died of the COVID-19 disease worldwide. Are these not enough reminders that one day we too shall die? The answer is a big NO because the death that we see around us is the death of someone else, not ours.
Movies, television, and the internet also conspire to make it difficult for us to accept our mortality. They feed us fantastic stories that transport us to imaginary times and places where we forget the shortness of our life and escape from the depressing realities that haunt us.
Neither do funeral homes, columbaria, and memorial parks give us real intimations of death. In funeral homes, corpses of our dear departed are prettified to make them look "alive." In memorial parks and columbaria, we see marble markers that tell us that our loved ones are not really dead; they are just "out of sight."
Death has become so disturbing that many countries in the West see old age as a disease. They force the elderly into sequestered “homes,” condemning them to years in quarantine.
We need Ash Wednesday because many of us live in denial. We invent many strategies to deny the fact that earthly life has a boundary. We busy ourselves with our trivial pursuits so we will have no time to think of our bodies becoming food for worms, or burned to ashes and deposited in an urn. We even try to outwit it like Woody Allen who said: “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens."
But as W.H. Auden writes: "Life is the destiny we are bound to deny until we have consented to die." He expresses best the paradox of Ash Wednesday. When we focus on death, what we see is not its face, but the value of our life. Ash Wednesday reminds us that since our life on earth is limited, every moment is so precious to let it pass by unused. Each moment can be our last, so the best time to live is not later, or tomorrow, but NOW.
This was also the message of the Gospel reading last Ash Wednesday (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18). Jesus tells us to make every moment of our life count by giving time to God in sincere prayer; by giving up sin and all those things that harm us; and by giving to others whatever we can share, especially to the least, the last, the lowly, and the lost.
The Grim Reaper eventually takes us all. But our Christian faith assures us that this is not something to be feared because in death, life is changed, not ended. Ash Wednesday inspires us to look forward to a future described by St. Paul thus: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love Him” (I Corinthians 2:9).