SOUL SEARCH

Ash Wednesday
Fr. Guy Guibelondo, S.J.

Posted Monday, 06-Mar-2006 3:06 PM

Homily delivered by Fr. Guy Guibelondo, SJ during the High School  Ash Wednesday Masslast March 1, 2006.

      Today we start the season of Lent. Today we also celebrate this last high school community mass for the school year as a send off for our seniors. And today, Ash Wednesday, we also receive the mark of the ashes burnt from the blessed palm fronds from last year’s Palm Sunday on our forehead.

      Lawrence Mick, an American priest writes about today’s occasion:

“When we receive ashes on our foreheads, we remember who we are. We remember that we are creatures of the earth ("Remember that you are dust"). We remember that we are mortal beings ("and to dust you will return"). . . We remember that we are people on a journey of conversion ("Turn away from sin and be faithful to the gospel"). We remember that we are members of the body of Christ (and that smudge on our foreheads will proclaim that identity to others, too).”

      But why do we put ashes on our foreheads? A Lutheran pastor, Roger Huffman traces its history and meaning from Christian tradition: “... In the Bible . . . people put on sackcloth and sat in ashes when they gave up any claim to self-worth, acknowledging their sin and its impact of turning them into junk or garbage, ready to be cast out of God's presence. Only when we see we are nothing on our own, will we see and long for the mercy of the Lord that saves.”

      And he adds that this act is not for everyone, it is only done by someone who has deep faith: “This is not an act of the new convert. It is the confession of the believer who joins the Psalmist (130) in yearning for God's mercy that we know is new every morning (Lamentations 3:22 ,23), the mercy we know we need to survive and be blest every day.”

      My dear friends we are at the end game of the school year. Harrel Wong of H4A dismissed the last formation of the CAT yesterday, and so Heinz Cu of H4E and Perth Salva of H4H can now put their fatigue uniforms away. The last basketball league of the school year, the Tiong Lian League, has been fought, nearly lost and won… the physics olympiad with its catapults and powerboats even finished well ahead of the winter games. Rigel Cua of H4F and his classmates has even showed me the finished report on a survey they made for their class requirement. We are even getting ready for next year. Richard Uy of H4C and the COMELEC are into the preparations for the SC elections.

      But what do we have to show for the school year? Can we actually say that we gave our best? Can we, with conviction, declare that we have optimized, made full use of the resources – time, money and people – made available to us? Can we claim we pushed ourselves to a spark, to kindle and to flame? Can we? Or did we yield to our appetites? Did we find it easier to procrastinate doing the home work? Was it much much more convenient to cram for the QTs? And was it not definitely more pleasurable to surf the net or play RPG, or doing what seemed to be best: nothing?

After all the class prayers and masses and retreats and recollections you have attended, are you any closer to God than you were at the start of the year? After the service interactions in Bilibid and SM, are you any closer to your fellowmen, to the poor? Or do you still yell at your tiny housemaid for not doing something you could have done yourself?

      Fr. Mick says: “It is so easy to forget, and thus we fall into habits of sin, ways of thinking and living that are contrary to God's will.”  And when we forget who we are in the eyes of God we s quander the opportunities He gives us along with His blessings.

      Lent has traditionally three disciplines: Fasting, Alms giving and prayer. These disciplines addressed the problems that Christians had with their witnessing to their faith. Problems which are still true today – your problem and mine.

      Fasting deals with the appetite, the different desires of the flesh. Alms giving – charity – calls us to deal with the world and material possessions, to look at it with the eyes of faith. Prayer brings us closer to His word and Jesus himself. And prayer keeps us from “listening to the lies of the devil.”

The purpose of the three disciplines is conversion. The message of the three readings we heard is conversion. We need to be converted. We need to renew our sense of who we really are before God -- the core of the Lenten experience – in our mediocre or disoriented lives. We need to realize and be constantly aware of who we are in the eyes of God so that hopefully, hopefully we will be more mindful of the opportunities that come our way, we will be more appreciative of the blessings that are given to us in the form of persons and property and time. We need to be constantly awake to God’s presence in our lives so that assured and strengthened we will strive to be better and push to spark and kindle, hopefully to create a flame, to let our light shine. The ashes imposed on our foreheads will give us a sense of who we truly are.

      I end with Fr. Mick who ties the Lenten season together: “The call to continuing conversion reflected in the … readings is also the message of the ashes. We move through Lent from ashes to the baptismal font. We dirty our faces on Ash Wednesday and are cleansed in the waters of the font. More profoundly, we embrace the need to die to sin and selfishness at the beginning of Lent so that we can come to fuller life in the Risen One at Easter.”

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