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Ash Wednesday (February 17/2021)
Your Daily Blessing: May the Lord fill you with courage in the face of all vicissitudes of life. Amen.
Narration:
It is amusing to see how much we had to ‘struggle’ to reconcile our needs to serve the thousands of people that will come to receive ash today with the Covid19 protocols put in place by the Church (Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Lagos).
In the end we had to ‘obey’ the regulation to give ash on the palm and not smudge it on the forehead, putting aside a thousand years of tradition in a bid to feel ‘safe’.
It amused me because the ash itself is an archetypical ‘symbol of death’ which all who participate in this ritual affirm as the lot of every human being. So, does this effort at “safety” not contradicting the very meaning of the ritual we celebrate this ash Wednesday?
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Whatever anyone’s view on the above question, I urge you to adopt simple obedience as your way of resolving complex spiritual questions particularly this season of penance.
The reason is simple: Lent is meaningless unless it lead us to more simple observance (obedience) of God’s commandments as confirmed by the words of the priests when we receive the ash: “repent and believe in the Gospel.”
Lent is a time set apart by the Church to help us reflect on what we might be doing that is more important than obeying God’s commands. Unless we take this simple truth seriously, death becomes an inevitable end we must dread than what our faith asks us to embrace with joy.
While we observe fully Covid19 protocols, we must not lose sight of the ‘meaning of death’ in our faith tradition, to which the vivid symbols and rituals of ash Wednesday eloquently and courageously testify.
PRAYER: Dear Lord, fear of death is a basic instinct in each of us. But your Son has conquered death and given us a new way of confronting it in our lives. Help us feel at home with our faith confessions so that our ‘HOPE’ may not seem vain.
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