How many times do we allow the idea of what others will think or say about our actions affect the choices we make? Jesus draws attention to this in today’s gospel, when he exhorts us to do acts of piety in secret, instead of making them unnecessarily conspicuous for all to know our holiness. This sin of vanity has always been a temptation for mankind, but it is even more difficult to avoid in today’s social media culture during what has been described as a narcissistic epidemic. We feel pressure to always project a positive image, we determine our relevance by our number of followers, and we quantify approval of major life events in likes, comments, and shares. For me, I can’t even avoid social media, since it is my job to be on it all day and stay in the know about the trends that affect it.
Today, on Ash Wednesday, it is particularly important that we keep this sin and all others at the forefront of our minds. The liturgy today is very much in the tradition of memento mori, the ancient practice to keep death in mind. When we receive our ashes, we hear the reminder that “you are dust and to dust you will return.” Thinking of death gives me an urgency for the process of sanctification and eradicating sin from my life, since my time on earth is fleeting. Keeping the perspective that all the trappings of this world will crumble to dust allows me to focus on the more important task of striving for sainthood.
But there is hope in the midst of all the sin, death, and ashes, hope in the cross by which our Lord Jesus Christ sacrificed himself “for our sake,” as it says in the second reading. How important it is that he “who did not know sin” took on our sin, so that we would be free to “receive the grace of God.”
While in college, I experienced a transformative moment during the sacrament of Reconciliation, when I rethought Jesus’ sacrifice and came to know in my heart that he did it out of love for me personally, not for some abstract concept of the greater good of the world at large.
When you receive such incredible, self-sacrificing, unbounded love, how can you respond with anything other than gratitude and your feeble human attempt at reciprocation? How can you doubt your self-worth, when he who knows the entire universe as well as every little thought and action of your entire life, decided that you were worth dying for? I’m reminded today, as I walk around with his cross on my forehead, that despite my brokenness, Christ has claimed me and marked me as his own.
Fr. Mike Schmitz sums up these ideas well in a video from Ascension Presents: “The ashes mean I’m a sinner, but the cross means that I have a savior. The ashes mean I’m not who I should be, but the cross means there’s a God who believes so fully in me that he is making me right now into the person that he believes I can be.”
Melinda McPherson is the Social Media and Website Coordinator in the Office of Communications for the Diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana.