Ash
Wednesday
Dear brothers and sisters,
Much like Saint Valentine’s Day, we
might say Ash Wednesday is a day about love. It might seem strange to say so,
given that February 14th has largely become associated with romantic
notions of love, and that on Ash Wednesday Mother Church calls us to “take up
battle with spiritual evils.”[1]
Today, then, is an opportunity for us to consider the nature of love. Saint Paul
exhorts us, saying, “we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain”
(II Corinthians 6:1). There is much to unpack in these few words, much that
concerns love.
If
we are to heed the Apostle’s warning, we must first know what he means by grace.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
teaches us that “grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us
to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of
the divine nature and eternal life.”[2] To put it perhaps more
simply,
God’s
grace denotes his gift of love, the love made known most dramatically in the
sending of his Son (cf. John 3:16) and in the gift of the Spirit in our hearts
(cf. Romans 5:5). Grace thus signifies that God holds nothing back in reaching
out to us in love.[3]
Yet despite this gift of grace we all
too often fail to reach out in love to God.
Saint Valentine, a priest in the city
of Rome, realized the tremendous gift we received in Christ and he devoted his
life to helping others realize the same; he sought to help them live in grace. When
Roman soldiers were forbidden to enter into marriage, me married them anyway, because
he wanted to be sure husbands and wives received the grace to keep the promises
of their marriages and so reflect God’s love for the Church. When he refused to
stop witnessing the marriages of soldiers, he was beheaded. So it is that the
color of Saint Valentine’s Day is red; it calls to mind the blood of this
martyr, blood shed in and for love of God and neighbor. Valentine heard Saint
Paul’s admonition and did not receive the grace of God in vain; he allowed this
grace to bear fruit in his life and be caught up in the life of God.
Saint
Augustine of Hippo at first resisted God’s gift of grace and so received it in vain,
yet one day he yielded. His interior longing for God prevailed and he exposed his
heart to grace saying that famously moving prayer: “You stir man to take
pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart
is restless until it rests in you.”[4]
Each
of us received this grace of God’s love, we received a share in the divine
life, in the waters of Baptism, but it is a grace to which we must respond
again and again if we do not wish to lose it; it is a love we sometimes resist.
This is why the Lord says to us through his prophet Joel, “return to me with your whole heart, with
fasting, and weeping, and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and
return to the LORD, your God” (Joel 2:12-13).
By
giving his life for the sake of others, Saint Valentine imitated the Lord Jesus
and so we see the life of Christ reflected in this martyr. By devoting his life
to his portion of the Lord’s flock, Saint Augustine imitated the Lord and so we
see the life of Christ reflected in his teachings. In a similar way, husbands
and wives are to live for each other, not for themselves, and so imitate the
selfless love of Christ. “What does it mean,” then, “to
receive the grace of God in vain except to be unwilling to perform good works
with the help of his grace?”[5] Indeed,
we see that “Paul’s exhortation not to receive God’s grace in vain is an appeal
to deeper conversion, that is, to avoid becoming partners with evil and to
continue to purify [ourselves] in mind and body.”[6] This
is what today is all about.
We have come before the Lord because
we know we have not always kept ourselves pure in mind and body. We have
received the grace of God in vain. We have failed to love both God and neighbor
and we have not always allowed the Lord to reflect his love through us. We have
heard the Lord’s call to “proclaim a fast” and to “call an assembly,” and so we
cry out to him, “Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned” (Joel 2:15; cf. Psalm 51:3).
The ancient symbol of Saint
Augustine is a heart on fire and pierced with arrows. The heart symbolizes his
restless longing for God; the fire his burning love for God and neighbor; and the
arrows the many times he was pierced by God’s grace, pierced by God’s love. The
restlessness of his heart and his encounters with God’s grace taught Saint Augustine,
as he said, that “nothing cleanses the heart but the undivided and
single-minded striving after eternal life…”[7]
In these coming days of Lent, let each
of us follow his example and strive after eternal life with undivided hearts. With
Saint Augustine, let us not shield our hearts from the Lord, but let us instead
hold them up to him. Let us expose our hearts to be pierced by his grace and set
afire with the love of God and neighbor. If we do, the Father will reward us and
give us back the joy of salvation, the joy of love (Matthew 6:4; Psalm 51:14). Amen.
[1] Collect of the Mass for Ash Wednesday.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1996.
[3] Thomas D. Stegman, Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture:
Second Corinthians (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009), 191.
[4] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 1.1. Henry Chadwick,
trans., Oxford World’s Classics: Confessions: A New Translation by Henry Chadwick
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.
[5] Caesarius of Arles, Sermon 126.5. In Thomas C. Oden, et al, eds., 251.
[6] Thomas D. Stegman, Catholic Commentary of Sacred Scripture:
Second Corinthians, 148.
[7] Saint Augustine of Hippo, Sermon on the Mount, 2.3.11. In Thomas
C. Oden, et al, eds., 128.
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