So I don’t really observe Lent.
I do like really helpful writing grounded in the Lenten season.
It’s almost like giving up cynicism for Lent.
The words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” and the application of ashes in the shape of a cross point to the reality of death, the identification of sinful rebellion as being the cause of death, and hope – in the shape of the cross – that God’s grace can turn back the tide which humanity has called on itself.
From Esau McCaulley’s book Lent – The Season Of Repentance And Renewal.
The liturgy makes a second connection as well, one that goes beyond the symbols of repentance found in biblical depictions of mourning. It takes us back to the origin of all our pain. Ash Wednesday evokes the punishment arising from the fall, when God says to Adam and Eve, “Dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). In other words, the sadness of Lent is not a general sadness about the inevitability of death but an explicitly Christian diagnosis of the cause of death. We sin and die because humanity rebelled against God. There is nothing natural at all about death. It is an alien intrusion into the good world God created. It is an enemy to be defeated. On Ash Wednesday we remember that we will die, but we do not accept it as the inevitable reality of the human ex- perience. Even in our acknowledgment of death there are hints of our rebellion against it.
Esau McCaulley, Lent – The Season Of Repentance And Renewal, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. 2022, pgs. 13-14
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