Justin Appel

‘The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit;
A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.’
Psalm 51:18

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today is the first day of the season of Lent, Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting on which we receive the imposition of ashes on the forehead.

There’s a certain ethos that sometimes goes along with this season and this first day of it, an ethos of penitence. We sometimes refer to Advent and Lent as penitential seasons, in that they provide us the opportunity to show sorrow for our sins — this is, after all, the definition of penitence. Surely, all of us need this rhythmic opportunity to express sorrow for our sins.

But our goal during Lent is not only penitence, but more especially, repentance. As Alexander Schmemann memorably put it, Lent really functions as a ‘school of repentance’, and by participating in it we are taught by the Church’s rhythms, doctrine, and spiritual disciplines to reevaluate our lives and ‘contemplate our existence’ in our ‘relation to God’. Thus, repentance is characterized by belief, self-awareness, and the act of turning ourselves to God from whatever we are tempted to worship instead.

One of the first things we contemplate in Lent is humility, via the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, which we read about today in Luke 18:9-14. This story is also the theme of the First Sunday in Lent in the Eastern calendar. In a way, the symbolic value of the ashes we impose underscores this theme: ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return’, the priest says. This doesn’t mean we are simply weak or defective, but that we are creatures, made by God’s Word and through the breath of the Spirit. This creatureliness means that our capacity to reflect God’s image, to house Christ’s body and blood in our bodies, or to grow in any kind of virtue or good work — all of this is due to God’s own creative genius, grace and goodness, and not to anything intrinsic to ourselves. We are dust.

May God bless your Lenten journey this year, and may we all arrive at its destination with true paschal joy, having prepared ourselves to meet the risen Christ.

Yours in Him,
Justin