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You may not realize it…and I don’t know exactly why…but for some reason Ash Wednesday…of all days in the Liturgical calendar…is the most attended of all celebrations…even more than Christmas...and maybe even more than Easter Sunday. You may even be surprised to know that it’s not a Holy Day of Obligation and yet year after year the lines in churches all over the world for a smudge of ashes on the forehead seem endless. In fact, I’ll bet that Catholics…if forced to choose…would probably skip a Sunday mass before they’d ever think to skip out on Ash Wednesday. Now that is curious!
I have a couple of ideas why. First off…Ash Wednesday is Honest. “Dust thou are…and to Dust thou shall return.” It doesn’t get any clearer than that. There’s no way around it…you can’t talk your way out of it…and you can’t postpone it indefinitely. One day every one of us in this room will die and we will face our Creator to make an account for our lives. It’s the starkest reality that we as human beings ever face. And this honesty is what makes Ash Wednesday one of the single most powerful church days of the year.
Secondly...lying just beyond this reality and deep within each of our souls there is also an innate desire to connect with something greater than ourselves. Something beyond what we can ever imagine for ourselves…something universal…something eternal. That’s why humans have always been explorers…scientists…astronauts…artists…dreamers. There’s just something natural in our souls pushes us to reach out beyond what we can personally grasp hoping to catch hold of something greater than ourselves. In classical theology we call this our Capax Dei…our capacity for God. We are the only members of the animal kingdom with this skill to contemplate the divine. Ash Wednesday is the perfect day for this sort of spiritual exploration.
And thirdly…I think we’re actually attracted to Ash Wednesday because it is the great equalizer. On Ash Wednesday a poor man stands shoulder to shoulder with a billionaire…an immigrant with a citizen…a Spanish speaker with an English speaker…a Nigerians with Indians with Vietnamese with Philippinos. Each of these people on this day comes to the realization that something greater is in control of our lives…something beyond us that is the source of all that is. And maybe that’s precisely why Ash Wednesday is the most attended day in the Church year. In a culture that lusts for control and seeks to dominate at any cost, there’s something oddly comforting in the prospect of taking a step back from this dysfunction for just an hour or two and rest in the reality that God knows what He is about. It’s really comforting to hear again God saying to us…in the depths of our hearts…Return to Me…Return to me with all your heart.
This is why we are here today…this is why we come back to receive our smudges of ash year after year. Ash Wednesday needs few words because it is so honest…it’s beautifully blunt. We don’t need a psycho-therapist to explain what it means…anything a wise theologian can say about it ultimately adds nothing to it. Ash Wednesday was written onto our hearts from the beginning of time and resonates forever in the language of the soul. It’s the day that tells us who we are and at the same time whose we are. This is why Ash Wednesday is one of the single most important days of the year.