Yesterday’s Chapel homily:

I spent the weekend in Canada, exploring in some places I’d never been before. On Saturday morning I found myself standing with one foot on each side of a fault line – by now a stable one, with no risk of an earthquake, but nevertheless a huge rupture in the earth. Either side of this rupture, as far as the eye could see, the entire landscape was covered in still, silent snow and ice. But down the centre of the fault line flowed a river too dramatically powerful to freeze over. The only place where life and movement could be seen was down this great crack in the earth.

Ash Wednesday is something that our modern-day culture finds it hard to grasp. We’re so used to positive thinking and self-help and assertiveness and therapy to build ourselves up that we’re not quite sure any more what to do with this thing called sin – the acknowledgement of which is all over the Bible, and threaded through all our historical theological literature and our prayer books.

Ash Wednesday is supposed to bring us face to face with two undeniable truths about ourselves. The first is that we are mortal. In a few moments we will invite you – if you wish – to receive ashes on your forehead, and the words that accompany the ritual are drawn from the Bible – from dust you came, and to dust you will return. They are similar to the words we use at funerals. They remind us that life is short, and fragile: we are neither immortal nor invincible. And secondly, we are reminded that we are both made in the image of God – gloriously so – and yet fractured right through. We are not perfect. We hurt each other, we hurt ourselves, and we hurt God in the process.

Ash Wednesday isn’t a call to return to some medieval inquisition, or to self-punishment, or to a loss of self-esteem. The faultline that runs through us has the possibility to be like that waterfall in Canada – that if we recognize our sinfulness and become stable in our self-knowledge, then life can flow; for – as Leonard Cohen put it – “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. The recognition of our flawed nature, together with the knowledge that – as the Psalmist said – “God remembers that we are but dust” – is immensely freeing; it enables us to accept and know ourselves as we are, to forgive ourselves and one another, and to know that God’s love has always been there for us, without measure, in the full knowledge that we have always been flawed, and we always will be.

So we invite you to receive ashes here today. If you have never done this before, what happens is this: you simply come forward to the centre – as you would for communion – and four ministers will be here at the centre holding a bowl of ashes – made from burning the Palm Crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday. These are mixed with a little oil, and the sign of the cross will be put on your forehead with these words: “From dust you came, and to dust you will return. Turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.”