A Homily for Ash Wednesday
Readings: Joel 2:12-18 2 Corinthians 5:20-6: 2 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
History and Ash Wednesday illustrate a mutual truth: Ideas are much easier to suggest than to suppress.
The past demonstrates that the suppression of ideas, at least in the long term, is nigh impossible. Here are two relevant examples. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
From 1795 to 1918, Poland had been suppressed as a nation, and its territory divided between Russia, Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire. In Polish provinces controlled by the soon-to-be-assassinated Czar Alexander II, Russian was made the compulsory language of instruction in the 1870s and 1880s. So, as Orlando Figes writes in The Story of Russia (2022), “Polish students at Warsaw University had to suffer the indignity of studying their national literature in Russian translation.”
Judging by how many people have ashes on their heads today, even on college campuses and busy urban streets, it successfully suggests a single notion: It is time to find our way home.
Idea suppression, especially love for one’s homeland, is strenuous work. Sometimes the more unsuccessful it is, the more strident the effort becomes. Under the even more ill-fated Czar Nicholas II, “during the 1907 cholera epidemic in the Kiev area, doctors were forbidden to publish warnings not to drink the water in Ukrainian. But the peasants could not read the Russian signs, and many died as a result.”
Ideas are much easier to suggest than to suppress. Ash Wednesday proves this to us. Judging by how many people have ashes on their heads today, even on college campuses and busy urban streets, it successfully suggests a single notion: It is time to find our way home.
In this regard, ashes say so much by saying so little. Who can count all the ways in which we have lost our way? But whatever they are and however many they are, let them be as ashes! “We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20).
There are 39 more days to begin the arduous process of suppressing what’s wrong with us. Today, a dollop of ashes suggests one great idea about what is right: A good and gracious God awaits our homecoming. “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart” (Jl 2:12).
