Time Immortal

Once more, the season of Lent has arrived, and once more Catholics world-wide will be receiving the sign upon their foreheads of ashes.

In the past, I used to struggle to reconcile the very visible sign of an ashen Cross upon the forehead with Christ’s teaching that, unlike “the hypocrites”, the faithful ought to pray in secret, so that God (who sees in secret) may be pleased and give blessings and reward. (Matthew 6)

But then, I think that would be the wrong teaching to reflect on when one is thinking about what Ash Wednesday is about, and what the ashes signify.

In another place in the Gospels (Luke 18), there is an interesting contrast given between two different people who have come to the temple to pray. One one hand, Jesus criticizes the very public prayer of the Pharisees, remarking on how they pray so as to be seen in prayer and lauded by others for how devout they are. On the other hand, the tax collector stands at a distance and openly weeps for being a sinner — he can be seen by others, and indeed others do notice him, but his prayer is offered in meekness and sorrow. He is not there to be seen, and would probably prefer not to be seen, but it is more important to him to beg forgiveness for his many sins.

It’s no coincidence that the above reading is sometimes used in Ash Wednesday services, and I think it more properly encapsulates just what the sign of ashes is all about. This is not an instance where we Catholics are professing our being Christian to the high heavens and expecting to be lauded for it. It is, first and foremost, a sign that we are weak, sinful, mortal, and doomed without the love of Christ to guide us. We are not saying “we are great”, but rather admitting that we are lowly, weak, and lost.

Courtesy of Jimmy Akin.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: The Curt Jester)

And on this, the second most solemn day of the year for Catholics, his thoughts are drawn to the two women recently used as carriers for reomtely-detonated bombs by al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Down’s people can be extremely suggestible. They are like children, in many respects, and especially, trusting like small children, even as adults. As the father of a Down’s child myself, I can tell you just how innocent they are, and how loving. God made them without guile, and utterly in need of our protection. And in return for that demand upon our decency (Down’s children in Canada today are usually aborted), He made them a light in this world. O Lord.

Yet the truth is, that the use of the mentally disabled to carry explosives — and of children, too — is a standard Islamist practice in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and elsewhere. So in this respect, too, the bombings at al-Ghazil and New Baghdad were nothing new. An even stranger truth, is that the Al Qaeda terrorists are human, like us. Like their victims. Like the two Down’s ladies.

Today is an international day of mourning, and it is because we are fully human that we need to wear the ashes on our brow.

It is interesting, the contrast drawn. One one hand, we have the very visible and very open barbarity of Islamist men using these mentally handicapped women — as naive and as trusting as they likely were, in their almost childlike way — as unwitting instruments of mayhem, death, and destruction. On the other hand, we have the silent and undiscussable barbarity of “choice”, the death sentence of abortion that we in the supposedly enlightened West inflict upon those unborn children who are found to be with ‘defect.’

The Reader will know that I’m not one for moral equivalence or “we’re just like the terrorists” thinking, but in this way I think we are every bit as horrible as those men of al-Qaeda who orchestrated the plan that killed a hundred people, and maimed hundreds more, in two Iraqi marketplaces just recently. They, like far too many of us, saw the disabled not as persons, but as things to be used and/or disposed of — or both.