As we come again to the beginning of the season of Lent—the Church’s primary season of repentance—I can’t help but think about how profoundly counter-cultural (and plain weird) it is to walk up to a priest, kneel, get some ashes rubbed on your forehead, and listen to them remind you that you are going to die; “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” C’mon, it’s weird! Repentance isn’t a sexy word; it doesn’t fit in with our emphasis on being “self-made” people or with the popular mantra of “no regrets.” Our culture seems largely concerned with the importance of having a positive self-image, and this usually means being always affirmed, but what if the way of repentance is the only way to for us to see ourselves honestly, without resorting to seeking out our worth at the expense of the other?
John Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, writes, “As long as we do not look beyond the earth, being quite content with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue, we flatter ourselves most sweetly, and fancy ourselves all but demigods.”[1] Of course, he goes on to make a point that is foreign to a catholic mind—the theory of “total depravity”—as it fails to account for the goodness of creation. Nevertheless, his immediate point is sound: We can always find some other human that we find “repugnant” or “disgusting” enough to make us pretty confident in our assumed “goodness.” The great irony, of course, is that in this perspective our “positive self-image” is dependent on the judgment and demonization of another. If we, even sometimes for valid reasons, find our sense of righteousness and self-worth in light of our opposition and moral superiority to anyone—a president, someone who supported a different political party, a “bigot,” a murderer, an annoying co-worker, a sibling, a refugee, a celebrity, a rapist, a hypocrite, a Wall Street trader, Hitler, anyone—we miss the point and we hide ourselves from the true point of self-discovery. I am absolutely not implying that it is unnecessary to oppose destructive actions in society or to stand against injustice, but I am saying that we don’t find our true worth by comparing ourselves to those who we find objectionable. Instead—strangely—we find it in ashes.
In our mortality we are all equal. We cannot build a tower, or a palace, or a wall that will keep us safe from death. It is the great equalizer. For a Christian, there is a particular death that we look to to find truth. The ashes that we receive on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday are in the form of a cross. We are directed beyond our own mortality to a moment in history and to an obscure man who died as a criminal on a hill outside Jerusalem. In Jesus, the God-Man, we see that the true point of humanity is not self-assuredness, ratings, moral superiority, pride, success, honor, cozy affirmation, respect, or any other predictable human endeavor or desire. Instead, we see a perfect self-offering for the sake of the other. We see extreme humility. We see God naked on a cross. We are of course free, as Calvin implies, to find someone “lesser” who makes us feel superior—wiser, more loving, more beautiful, more “woke”—but in that we are perpetuating the same destructive game that we claim to be fighting against. Instead, we can repent in dust and ashes, acknowledging our mortality and insufficiency, and look to the one True Human. When we see him for who he is, then maybe we can begin to be honest with ourselves—seeing both the good and the bad. It is in the divine self-emptying of the cross that we find our worth. We are beloved at the expense of no one but God. We also will die, and there’s nothing that we can do about that. But death, as we come to find out, isn’t the last word. In the meantime, maybe we need someone to rub some ashes on our foreheads once a year, look us in the eyes, and say to us, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”
