We often imagine ceremonial days as fixed and unchanging. Christmas or Australia Day was, is, and always should be the same. In fact, such days accumulate meaning over time, layered like pearls or tree rings, taking on new layers of meaning and weight from new events and circumstances. This is true of the Christian feast of Ash Wednesday, now associated in Australia with bushfires, and of the season of Lent and Easter it inaugurates. For many Victorians, Easter Monday is associated with the Stawell Gift. In Ireland Easter is linked to the Easter Uprising. Such associations are not mere decorations on the Easter tree. They are part of the tree itself. But they can slip from memory.
This year, Ash Wednesday is overshadowed by the cascading consequences of decisions made by the United States government. Those repercussions will be felt by victims of war in Ukraine and Gaza, refugees and immigrants and their families in the U.S. and beyond, poverty-stricken children reliant on foreign aid, civil servants losing their jobs, disadvantaged people generally, and all those against whom popular rage is directed in an increasingly brutal and self-centred society. The effect of these things will continue to be associated with Ash Wednesday and Lent. It is vital that they be held in memory, as the memory of the Holocaust has been held in Germany.
In this context, the long, layered process by which Ash Wednesday and Lent took their present shape offers an instructive parallel. These observances grew by accretion. They began with the core belief that God has forgiven our sins and given us life through the death and resurrection of Jesus. That led early Christians to dedicate a special feast to celebrate that mystery, one that was given sharp focus by the constant threat of persecution. This feast was then gradually surrounded by layers of story, prayer, and other practices which reflected the societies and the times in which Christians lived.
From the beginning, these included fasting, a regular part of Jewish and later of Christian practice. Fasting marked seriousness. It signified the acknowledgment of sin and a communal renewal of faith. Around this five-week fast grew other stories, relevant to Jesus’ death such as God freeing the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, which was celebrated in the Jewish feast of the Passover. The link to the Passover was central to the Gospel story of Jesus’ death. Both stories were echoed in the experience of a marginal Christian community expelled from Synagogue and vulnerable in Empire.
The length of the Lenten fast was also shaped by stories. The people of Israel spent forty years in the desert before entering the promised land. Jesus spent forty days fasting and praying in the desert for forty days before beginning his public ministry. What began as a five-week fast was lengthened to forty days, beginning with Wednesday.
When the Roman Empire finally accepted Christianity and Christians returned to Jerusalem, another layer was added. During Lent, Christians began commemorating Jesus’ final days from his entrance into Jerusalem to the Last Supper, imprisonment, crucifixion and rising. These observances were gradually adopted by the rest of the Church.
Lent also became the season to prepare for baptism at Easter, symbolising their dying with Christ in baptism and rising to a new Christian life. The Resurrection was also echoed in the transformation of the Church from persecution to acceptance and freedom. During lent, too, Christians publicly confessed serious sins, particularly that of having denied their faith during recent persecution. They dressed in sackcloth and ashes before being received back into the Church at Easter. This history, with the associated realisation that freedom could breed mediocrity, is reflected in the sombre colours of Lent and in the sprinkling of ashes on Ash Wednesday, a major layer in the liturgical celebration of Jesus’ dying and rising.
The feel of the celebration, however, continued to be marked by new associations and forgetting. Sundays dedicated to preparing for Lent, Mystery Plays, Cantatas, and hymnody, series of sermons and distinctive foods, and the compulsory confession of sins before Easter all coloured the celebration of Lent and Easter in different churches.
'Within a culture that emphasises the freedom of individuals to make whatever they wish of themselves and their world, remembering and honouring do not come easily. They require effort.'
In the last century, fasting has effectively disappeared in Western churches, and the religious associations of Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter have largely been lost from the public culture. The observance is largely confined to mind and will and not to body.
But the association of Lent with significant cultural movements illustrates the importance and complexity of remembering core beliefs and events that remind us of how we should live. They form a matrix in which we can place and recognise the threat and promise posed by new crises. A forgetful society risks dancing into doom. That underlies the fear in Germany that the lessons learned by the rise, dark flowering and destructiveness of Nazism are being lost from memory. It also underlines the importance of remembering the consequences for unregarded human beings as we witness an erosion of the rule of law and the dismissal of human dignity at both national and international levels.
For churches and religious communities, this means framing human suffering and the acts of vandalism that cause it within the very heart of the observances of Lent. Within a culture that emphasises the freedom of individuals to make whatever they wish of themselves and their world, remembering and honouring do not come easily. They require effort. Just as monasteries once preserved the seeds of renewal through dark ages, so must we labour to sustain memory, so that what is vital is not lost.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
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