Fr. Roger J. Landry
Carmelite Monastery of Our Mother of Mercy and Saint Joseph
Alexandria, South Dakota
Ash Wednesday, Extraordinary Form
March 2, 2022
Joel 2:12-19, Matt 6:16-21
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- The message of Ash Wednesday is given to us by the Prophet Joel: “Return to me with your whole heart.” Our God is who “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, rich in kindness and relenting in punishment,” summons us to come back to him not half-heartedly, but with our whole heart. This calling means several things:
- To return to him with love, indeed, all of our love. Sometimes we can approach the Lord out of a sense of duty, we can go through the motions, we can even regard him with fear. He fills us with his love so that we can indeed approach him with love.
- To return to him with purity of heart. We can’t love him with our whole heart if our heart is set on other objects, full worldly cares and anxieties, the lure of earthly pleasures or even spiritual goods like consolations. We can’t come back if our heart carries the baggage of sinful desires consented to.
- To return to him with the whole of our being. In the Bible, the heart always symbolizes the core of the person, where reason, will and emotions converge. The Lord wants us back body and soul fully.
- To return to him with courage. He wants us not to lose heart, but to be lionhearted in hearing and heeding his call to a spiritual renewal. He wants us to put our heart into the good fight, to be valiant in the Lenten discipline he gives us to make us greater disciples.
- God through the Prophet Joel then sketches for us various means to return to him wholeheartedly:
- With fasting — to help us hunger for him
- With weeping — out of contrition for our sins and the sins of the world, seeking to allow him to bring good out of evil through a medicine of mercy greater than our illness
- With mourning — for so many opportunities and graces lost, seeking to make up for lost time, and conscious that those who mourn are blessed and will be consoled.
- To bring offerings and libations — a prophecy, of course, to the self-offering of Jesus’ body and blood in the Eucharist, together with our own self-offering on the paten.
- To gather the people, notify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children — Conversion is not meant to be a solo or individualistic process, but an ecclesial one
- To have the bridegroom and bride leave the honeymoon suite — indicating that there’s a greater love involved even than the most fresh experiences of human love, because human marriage is meant to remind us of God’s plan for the maker to marry us, to heed and live the spousal message of Hosea and Isaiah.
- To have priests on behalf of everyone cry out before the altar for mercy and asking God to manifest his loving forgiveness before all peoples, so that we may no longer be a source of reproach but a source of inspiration and sanctification.
- This is what it means to return to the Lord with our whole heart: with our stomachs, tear ducts, pierced hearts, with sacrifice, with others, with spousal commitment and love, in communion with our clergy, with an awareness that God calls us to reflect light to the world not scandal.
- Jesus in the Gospel intensifies this message. The Son of God took on our nature precisely to show and help us to return to God with our whole heart. He reminds us today, “Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” Lent is about rediscovering the extraordinary treasure to which God has made us heirs. The kingdom of heaven, Jesus said elsewhere, is like a treasure buried in a field worth selling everything else we have in life to obtain. He wants to help us to recalibrate our heart to that treasure who is God, because the Kingdom of God is, as Pope Benedict used to remind us, God, it’s living with him, abiding in him and him in us. The process of Lent is to help us to place our treasure in God, to recognize the extraordinary gift, and with God’s grace, to seize that gift, and to let go of everything that will hinder our attaining it.
- Jesus calls us not just to recognize the treasure and to seek it but to “store up” this treasure that moth or decay can corrode or thieves pilfer. He wants us to seek to make the treasure grow, more than the unwise man in the Gospel image sought to enlarge his grain bins, more than a greedy Wall Street investor seeks to make his portfolio and commissions expand. He wants us to build our relationship with him and make it strong enough even that roaring lions who prowl about the world seeking to devour and ruin souls can’t succeed.
- When we recognize that Lent is about recognizing and storing up treasure, it influences our whole approach to this sacred season and makes it joyful. It’s not a “gloomy” season but a glorious and joyful one. We don’t fast focused on our stomach and everything we are giving up — like desserts, drinks, meat, eggs, milk, cheese and other dairy products — but on what we are receiving and hope to receive even more, every word that comes from God’s mouth, the supersubstantial bread and true Manna God gives us ever day, the food, like Jesus, of doing the will of the Father. Jesus wants us not only not to show off like the hypocrites who want everyone to recognize and praise them for their fasting, but rather to anoint our head and wash our face, in other words, to be filled with the Holy Spirit and let the full transparence of the beauty God has given us shine. He wants us to recognize the gift God the Father has given us and to show him by our fasting from smaller things how grateful we are for the gift of our relationship with him.
- That’s what it means to return to God with our whole heart. It means to set our heart on the true treasure, to hunger for it, to rejoice over both the gift as well as the grace of hunger for that gift, and to set our hearts firmly on the Divine Giver.
- The ashes we receive today are meant to help us live this summons. As we receive them, we are instructed, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,” “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” We remember that we will die, perhaps as early as today, which gives us an urgency to return to God with our whole heart. We remember that as a result of sin, our body will perish, and so we’re called to use the body to glorify God, to offer our body as an acceptable sacrifice, our spiritual worship, beginning with our fasting and the way we tame the appetites of the body so that we may hunger for God and what he gives. We remember that though we are dust, God has breathed into us the breath of life, giving us an immortal soul, that he wants forever to live in his presence and, at the General Resurrection, to reunite with a body that will no longer be perishable dust but imperishable and full of glory. The ashes blessed and imposed on our forehead in the sign of the Cross reminds us of how the Lord Jesus himself died on Calvary out of love for us but rose on the third day, so that we might repent and believe in the Gospel with our whole existence, and seize the treasure he died and rose to bestow.
- Finally, in the midst of this retreat on Reinvigorating our Eucharistic Awareness, Amazement, Love and Life, on seeing Jesus’ self-giving in preparation for the eternal nuptial feast as the apogee of salvation history, we see that returning to the Lord with our whole heart must have a clearly Eucharistic focus. We fast for him. We weep and mourn for the ways he is treated, as he himself said to St. Margaret Mary, with indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn. We unite ourselves to him as he offers his body and pours out his blood as the sacred libation. We blow a trumpet and invite everyone, from elders to infants, to this feast, as our gracious and merciful God sends grain and wine for our human hands to crush so that they may become the elements of bread and wine that Christ will convert into his body and blood. And we come here begging for the grace not just to make to make this gift the true treasure of our hearts but to grow and store up ever more grateful love for the one who in Lent joins us in the desert with prayer, fasting and almsgiving.
The readings for this Mass were:
A reading from the Book of Joel
Yet even now, says the LORD, 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. For gracious and merciful is he, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and relenting in punishment. Perhaps he will again relent and leave behind him a blessing, Offerings and libations for the LORD, your God. Blow the trumpet in Zion! proclaim a fast, call an assembly; Gather the people, notify the congregation; Assemble the elders, gather the children and the infants at the breast; Let the bridegroom quit his room, and the bride her chamber. Between the porch and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep, And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people, and make not your heritage a reproach, with the nations ruling over them! Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’” Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land and took pity on his people. The LORD answered and said to his people: See, I will send you grain, and wine, and oil, and you shall be filled with them; No more will I make you a reproach among the nations.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew
Jesus said to his disciples, “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to others to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and decay destroy, and thieves break in and steal. But store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor decay destroys, nor thieves break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”
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