Have a dreadful Lent

If you go to church on 21 February the chances are you will be invited to the front to have the sign of the Cross traced on your forehead in ash. The priest will then tell you that you are dust and to dust you must return. Not very user friendly is it? Whatever happened to the good news? This isn't the back to church Sunday feelgoodaboutGod stuff we have been promising. Or is it? Surely the whole point of the Christian faith is that God saves us in the mess and muddle of human life, not from it. Life goes on being difficult, compromised, tarnished. Jesus comes right into the middle of it. He doesn't say there will be no more pain or dying. Not in this life. He doesn't prevent it, he saves us in it. He promises that in our deaths we will be safe in his death, even when we are dust.

Ash Wednesday is the terrible proclamation of reality. We will die, and being a Christian won't save us from it. What it will do is enable us to face it. Death is not just the hideous and hopeless ending that must be postponed for as long as possible (this is the best news the world can muster); through Christ's death it is the way that God is united with us and us with God, 'creating a new humanity, thus making peace' (Ephesians 2. 15).

Lent is the time when by prayer, fasting, almsgiving, penitence we face up to the reality about ourselves and the reality of what God has done in Christ. We make ourselves ready: to receive the unmerited joy of Easter but also ready for that day, which isn't a day but the breaking of God's eternity into our chronology, when the scattered fragments of our lives - the dust - will be gathered into glory. May we receive the dreadful good news of our dying and of our being saved by Christ's dying and thus learn meekness. This is hard in a world which prizes such dependence on self. Hard in a church which is desperate to be successful. Hard when we consume ourselves on secondary matters, wondering who is in or out. Hard when the bullets keep flying and being safe so as to secure life is preferable to being saved by losing it. So receive the ashen cross and learn the way of Christ. May I wish you a dreadful Lent.