Out of the ashes

Donesk airport 

Debaltseve is suspended in the buffer zone between Russia and the disputed territory of eastern Ukraine. We see the ashes of Donetsk airport through a drone’s camera lens. We glimpse, online, the face of an old woman. She remembers another war which devastated her country more than half a century ago. A tear glistens in her left eye. Another elderly woman sets about ‘clearing up’, as one online report puts it. She is at work with a dustpan and brush on the doorstep of her shattered house. The ceasefire may yet hold, or it may not, but for a moment we can be present to a nation’s suffering. Being present to the suffering of nations is a way of re-affirming what is good about humanity.

To be human is also to die. Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we consider the stark reality of our own mortality, the fact that we are dust and that to dust we shall return. It is in this sombre context that we are also called to repent. In former times this was done literally ‘in dust and ashes’. Now, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross made from the ashes of last year’s Palm Sunday crosses.

There is something significant about the tactile nature of this small ceremony. It invites us to think of our mortality and of repentance as belonging together, and yet the two are quite separate. Our mortality is an irrevocable aspect of the human condition, but repentance is down to us. It means, as the rest of the Ash Wednesday liturgical phrasing puts it, ‘to turn away from sin’. We have a choice.  For many, turning away from sin sounds overtly pious, not something one would want to rush to church for on a cold evening in February. But repentance is not an ascetic exercise for the religiously inclined. It is essential to the survival of the planet and of the human race, because it restores life.

Repentance is therefore everyone’s concern. It is both collective and personal. Nations are comprised of persons, of human beings whose lives and decisions shape the destinies of families and communities, and of the nation itself. They, and those they influence or control, can reduce a once fine airport to ashes, and with them lies the responsibility for the elderly woman ‘clearing up’ in between rocket attacks. Also, we all ultimately depend for our survival as a species on the planet which we are wrecking through conflict, greed and materialism. Archaeological research suggests that our planet has outlived other species in the past and could outlive us if we choose not to repent.

Nations repent when enough individuals apply enough pressure on those who hold the most power to push them to repentance, to push them to choose life for the rest of us. Part of our own repentance therefore consists in taking responsibility for the repentance of those over whom we have some influence. This is not a matter of applying sanctions, or, as in other conflict situations, of retaliatory bombing raids.

The conflicts we see around us are about the exercise of power, and hence about greatness. Repentance is about relinquishing power and accepting our mortality, our littleness and vulnerability, and that our lifespan and that of our planet is held in God’s. This is where a huge reality shift needs to take place. We have mistaken what is real for what is unreal by allowing collective vanity and self aggrandisement (otherwise known as national identity) to destroy our humanity. The last part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy urges us to be faithful to Christ. What it is reminding us of, though, is his faithfulness to us.