Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday 

“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” The Gospel acclamation of today’s Mass centers on our struggle for the weeks ahead. We begin an intense liturgical time during which God through the Church will give us special graces to undergo a new conversion. We need to hear his voice and let our hearts become softer like a sponge, to absorb as much as we can from the power of God. During the year, our hearts have been hardened by the obstacles found on the way, blackened with the dust of the road, damaged with so many wounds inflicted on our soul. We need to stop and have a spring cleaning, repair the damage, and recover our youthful, tender heart.

Saint John Paul II used to say that because we are in statu viatoris, travelers on the way to our homeland, we find ourselves in statu conversionis, in need of conversion, constant improvement. This means that we are in a state of permanent conversion, in the need of beginning and beginning again all the time. It can seem tiresome, always the same, but it keeps us going, knowing that at the end of the road, our Father God is waiting with his arms outstretched. Looking at him, fixing our eyes on him, helps us to endure whatever obstacles we find in our way.

We are climbing the mountain of holiness and from time to time we stop at the lookouts to admire the panorama. The higher we go it gets better, it looks more beautiful, breathtaking. But we cannot stay there for too long; we need to keep going. Lent is a time when we recommence the path and begin to climb up again. When you organise activities with children, they keep asking the same question, when they have finished whatever they were doing: What’s next? You need to think ahead, plan the next move, otherwise you are going to be overtaken by them. Now is the time to ask Jesus: What’s next? What do you want me to improve during this Lent?

We know that while travelling here on earth, we can lose our way, deviate from our course, get lost, side track, bogged down. The wind, the waves, the currents, can affect the direction of the ship, and we have to make the necessary readjustments, in order to reach ourdestination. The sooner the better, otherwise it is going to take us longer to come back to the right path. The first Australian saint, Mary MacKillop, who travelled all around this enormous country on horseback, used to say: “We are just travellers here.” We are passing by. Don’t get too attached to the things of this world.

Once I saw an exhibition in Sydney called “Trailblazers”. It was an account of how different people did something nobody had done before. There were videos, photos, samples of their first achievement. There were crazy people, adventurers, innovators, who made new tracks through wild country, places unknown to humanity. They wanted to do something special, to inscribe their names in the golden book of history. We are all trailblazers in life. We all have our own way, and we are the only ones who can walk it. I remember a quotation from the exhibition: “An aviator's life may be full of ups and downs, but the only hard thing about flying is the ground.”

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