ASH WEDNESDAY 2010
February 17, 2010

FIRST SERIES

THE FORTY DAYS OF LENT

The above refers to practices in the Roman church and in churches derived from Rome. From about  the 5th century onwards, in the early Irish church,  one to one ‘confession’ of sins (major ones and ordinary ones) to a kind of ‘spiritual director’ (often not a priest but a monk-layperson) began, and became popular.  This person then imposed a ‘penance’.  Only when this ‘penance’ was completely carried out was absolution given.  For quite a time, especially towards the 8th century, the two forms of penance, public-Roman and private-Irish, tended to exist together in many places.  In the middle ages, it was the penance needed for a sin, rather than the public or private character of the sin itself, that took hold of the popular imagination.  Even if no one knew about a sin, and it was really ‘private’, penance was still thought to be needed.

The traditions linked with the official ‘penitents’ at Ash Wednesday were applied to all adults in the parish, but in a somewhat mitigated form.  By the 11th century, the practices in use were much milder.  From the 9th century, until the 13th, immediate absolution, prior to any ‘doing’ of a given penance, came to be usual.  You could do or say your penance (some prayers, usually) later on.  Early in the 13th century, at the 4th Lateran Council in 1215, the church obliged people to confess the mortal sins of which they were aware at least once a year.  The natural time for that was Easter – in preparation for Easter Eucharistic communion.   It was ‘Easter Duty’ to go to confession.  This naturally changed the sense of Lent among the people.  [Note that there was never an obligation to go to confession at Easter, or at any other time, if people in conscience knew they were not in mortal sin.  These people were advised to go, as an act of devotion only. This comment holds good today. Later church practice often asked ‘Easter duty’ of everyone.]

Between the 4th Lateran Council (1215) and the 16th century council of Trent a new sense of the mortality of mortal sin developed.  Before this time, ‘mortal’ sin referred to a fault that excluded from the community-Eucharist (without doing the necessary penance first).  From this time on, ‘mortal’ sin began to refer to exclusion from eternal salvation: as a result, there was also exclusion from the community-Eucharist as just indicated.  As a result, from the 13th to the 20th century, people who sinned have lived with the impression that their eternal salvation depended on going to confession properly and receiving absolution from sin.  Many people have no sense of this history – they think ‘mortal sin’ was always mortal in the way they perhaps learnt at school in the 20th century.   

People – many of us – have a ‘feeling’ that mortal sins in the modern sense happen a lot, that we ourselves ‘do’ them, often without wanting to, that we ought to ‘do penance’ and ‘go to confession’ because of that.  This is surely, at best, an exaggeration…. Most of us don’t live like that.  ‘Frequent’ confession in the modern sense is only about a hundred years old.  It is linked with frequent communion, which was introduced, especially for children, about a hundred years ago. Usually the penance given was one or three Hail Mary’s.  One result was the need to introduce children to confession at a very early age: this put language patterns into confession that have remained for the lifetime of many people, despite the fact that they were appropriate only for very young children.  Another result was an increased number of confessions of adults, confessing small things that often were hardly sins at all.  Going to confession became a weekly/monthly act of devotion.

[The term ‘sacrament’ was not applied to any of the rituals of penance before the 12th century.  There were then long lists of ‘sacraments’.  In popular usage, they came down soon to the famous seven.  There had always been a special sense in the use of the word ‘sacrament’ for Baptism-Confirmation, and for Eucharist.  In the 16th century, the reformers (Luther) tried to do away with all sorts of superstitious rituals that had emerged from an excessive piety.  They insisted that the only real sacraments were those whose institution by Christ was reported in express terms in scripture.  This would leave out penance.  In reply, the council of Trent affirmed the existence of a sacrament of penance distinct from baptism. ]

All of this must indicate a change of thinking about Lent.  Lent, in the mild form we do it now, is not based on a heavy or severe attitude to our wickedness or our mortal sins.    When we receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, we are not saying we are great sinners in need of reform! We are saying we are ordinary people in humble need of God’s continuing merciful understanding.  Nowadays, there has emerged an alternative to the traditional formula for the imposition of the ashes at the beginning of Lent.  It highlights a more positive aspect of Lent.  ‘Change your way of life and believe in the Gospel’.  Sometimes the book of the gospels was placed on the head, as well as – or instead of - the ashes.  The Gospel has a larger and more positive message than repenting for things we fear may have been big sins….  It urges us always to a big Love.

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ASH WEDNESDAY 2010
SECOND SERIES (briefly, to allow due time for the ceremony)

St.Augustine wrote: ‘You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they calm down in You.’  

That’s a whole Lenten program.  It’s a whole lifetime program.  I want to pick up some of the words, and some of the words behind the words.

‘for’ Yourself.

The word indicates not just the Person we are seeking (God) but the movement towards that person.  ‘For’ means ‘towards’.  We are not there yet.  But we are on the way….in the right direction.

‘restless’.  Literally, ‘un-quiet’.  Lent is about un-un-quieting. 

One form of unquiet is external: contradictory preoccupations that disturb our peace of mind.  Another form of it is internal: it is our own refusal to rest in anything except what we have decided we want – that is usually called ‘desire’ (in fact, it is usually plural – ‘desires’).  ‘rest’.  It means being one, being unified, being integrated.  [Not quite the same as being alone!]  It is being one-d interiorly.  The opposite is having two psyches (you pick which one to show others according to who they are and who you want to be for them at the time).  Call it being two-faced.  The Hebrews called it having ‘a heart and a heart’.  The remedy is simplicity – not being a simpleton, but not being sophisticated either.  Just being.  Which is the same as being just. 

Try it for Lent  this year.

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