It is Ash Wednesday tomorrow and I will go to receive ashes on my head in a ritual which was once, for many, a common practice, but, which now, in our secular city, may seem bizarre. We live in a society driven by market and media which will happily hijack any religious festival which serves the interests of its gods. We have hardly recovered from an over-hung and over-hyped Christmas, when Valentine breaks our hearts and fills that commercial gap before the drive towards the chocolate orgy of Easter.
But there are no cards urging us to have a "Happy Lent" or signs insisting "Get your ashes here!" Before this article shapes up into the expected sacred versus secular reading of society bemoaning the loss of a religious dimension, we should remember that the borrowing was not all one way.
Religious festivals borrowed from pagan rites, and religion and culture have always been inextricably tied, so the distinctions between pure and impure, sacred and profane, holy blessing and unholy kiss, are less sharp than we might wish. The essential meaning of the incarnation is surely the celebration of the confusion of the two.
So the argument with our secular society is not so much that it is driven by market and matter, but that it rests on false illusions. It denies the essential ambiguity of our humanness and promises an unattainable perfection, driving us towards greater and greater accumulation of dissatisfaction. To counteract this pain there are now infinite numbers of self-help manuals, spiritual practices and therapies, all serving to increase our anxieties with their relentless optimism about our ability to take control of our lives and to heal ourselves.
Against this backdrop comes the sobering reality of the Ash Wednesday service with its stark reminder of the truth of who we are: "Remember that you are dust and unto dust you will return." False illusions of control are stripped away and we are placed under a sentence of death - yet, marked by the sign of the contradictory cross - this is, at the same time, a sentence of life.
The journalist John Diamond, writing in the London Times about his now inoperable cancer, expresses his surprise that people ask him about his will to live. "Why don't they ask a 70-year-old father the same thing?" he wonders. Every day for John Diamond is Ash Wednesday - every day he is confronted by the vulnerability of his flesh and by the loss of control over the course of the disease.
There is a difference, not in kind, but in degree between Diamond's condition and our own. He has been made sharply aware of his mortality. His time has been marked out for him. He knows this is his "last chance", in the phrase of poet Mary Oliver, "to be alive and know it". Rituals and liturgies which mark thresholds between life and death offer some opportunity of assenting to loss, assenting to death, and paradoxically attending to life. They take us safely into the places of darkness which we fear, into the suffering and death which we deny and, enabling us to face that darkness, bring us to life and light. Lent shapes that kind of pattern in us. It holds us in what T.S. Eliot calls "the time of tension between dying and birth".
The word Lent comes from an old English word meaning spring. My dictionary of liturgy considers that the now obsolete meaning has no relevance for the understanding of Lent as 40 days of fasting in preparation for Easter, which take their significance from the biblical 40 days in the wilderness with Moses, and in the desert with Jesus.
However, I would like to retrieve that other sense and hold both together: here the cycles of history and nature meet. As we enter the 40 days of desert, nature is insisting vehemently on life's return. As we learn through liturgical patterns that unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it cannot live, nature illustrates the process.
This year the intensity of light which ushered in St Brigid's Day and the beginning of spring seemed particularly full of promise. The earth renews itself and the prayer of the psalm is echoed: "Create in me a clean heart O God/and put a new and right spirit within me."
The idea of Lent as a time of negativity, of harshness, of the "mortification of the flesh", of "giving up" all that was pleasurable finds little room in current practice. We have turned from "giving up" to "giving". But perhaps we need to revisit those old practices and set them in a different context. From the Greek Orthodox tradition comes the idea of the feast making sense of the fast.
The feast sets the context - the bread and wine which earth has given, which human hands have made. We do not give up these earthly pleasures in order to focus on heavenly things but for goodness sake - to know these things as creation's gift, to know there is no other way to the sacred but through the dust of the earth.
Lent is not about a turning away from the flesh and the world but a returning to the centre and the source: "Return to me with all your heart."
It is about a turning inside and out, knowing again the presence of the sacred in the ordinary exchanges of tired flesh and new blood, in the feet of clay, in the dust of the earth, in the ashes of dead stars from which, trailing broken wings, we come.
Blessed be the dust,
From the dust the world
utters itself.
We have no other hope,
no knowledge.
The word
chose to become
flesh. In the blur of flesh
we bow, baffled.
(Denise Levertov from `Mass for the Day of Thomas Didymus', Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books 1986)
Anne Thurston is a writer and theologian. Her most recent book, Knowing Her Place; Gender and the Gospels, was published by Gill & Macmillan in 1998.
