Pope: Ashes ‘bring us back to reality’

Ash Wednesday Mass in the Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome | VATICAN MEDIA Divisione Foto

In his homily for Ash Wednesday, Pope Francis says that the imposition of ashes reminds us to “look within ourselves” and remember our fragility – “from dust we are created, and to dust we shall return”.

Ashes “revive in us the memory of what we are”, but also “the hope of what we will be”.

That was how Pope Francis started his homily for this year’s Ash Wednesday liturgy, held in Rome’s Basilica of Saint Sabina.

As the Pope is currently in hospital receiving treatment for bilateral pneumonia, his homily was read out by Cardinal Angelo De Donatis, Major Penitentiary of the Apostolic Penitentiary.

Speaking off the cuff before delivering the homily, Cardinal De Donatis invited those present to listen to Pope Francis’ words for the occasion and said, “We feel deeply united with him in this moment, and we thank him for the offering of his prayer and his sufferings for the good of the entire Church and the whole world.”

^{Cardinal De Donatis delivers Pope Francis’ homily for Ash Wednesday Mass}

Human fragility

The Pope began by focusing on the ways that the imposition of ashes reminds us of deeper realities about ourselves.

“We bow our heads in order to receive the ashes”, he said, “as if to look at ourselves, to look within ourselves. Indeed, the ashes help to remind us that our lives are fragile and insignificant: we are dust, from dust we were created, and to dust we shall return.”

This fragility takes many forms, the Pope said: weariness, weaknesses, fears, failures, failed dreams, illness, poverty, suffering, and, of course, mortality.

Although we sometimes try to flee these realities, Pope Francis said, the imposition of ashes “reminds us of who we are”.

This is good for us, he stressed – it helps prevent narcissism, and brings us back to reality, making us “more humble and available to one another”.

^{Ash Wednesday Mass at Santa Sabina}

Our hope

While ashes remind us of our fragility, however, Pope Francis said, they also remind us of our reasons for optimism.

“The ashes remind us,” the Pope said, “of the hope to which we are called in Jesus, the Son of God, who has taken upon himself the dust of the earth and raised it to the heights of heaven.”

Such hope is important, Pope Francis said, because, without it, we risk “passively enduring the fragility of our human condition” and, in the face of our own mortality, “sinking into sadness and desolation”.

Pope Francis brought his homily to a close with an exhortation to “return to God with all our hearts”.

“Let us place Him at the centre of our lives,” the Pope said, “so that the memory of what we are — fragile and mortal as ashes scattered upon the wind — may finally be filled with the hope of the Risen Lord.”