26.02.2020
‘Become a New Creation in Lent’ – Ash Wednesday Service at DCU
“Lent sets us free for God, for ourselves and for others.” So said Archbishop Michael Jackson at the Ash Wednesday Service in Dublin City University’s Interfaith Centre last week. He suggested that most people were so confused by what Lent is that they either vaguely remember it or promptly forget it.
“We think somehow that it has to be about giving things up, about self–denial as a trial and a tribulation, about self–punishment, about withdrawing from the world and the flesh in order to do battle with the devil: and because we no longer understand the idea that there is any such thing or such person as the devil, an expression of personal evil, we cannot take it seriously,” he commented.
But, the Archbishop continued: “Lent is something quite different. It is our annual effort to abstain from sin itself and to set us free for God and for ourselves and for others. You may wonder why previous generations personalized evil. You need look no further than our own generation to see that they may well have had a point in doing this. Time and again, so much of the evil of our day is personal. The structural and systemic evil we see enfolding us tends to be the brainchild of people seeking power and influence, dominance and destruction, malice and wickedness – either over individuals or over nations. From child abuse the whole way through to digital pornography, time and again we see individuals at the heart of the evil that is being done and being shared and being trumpeted. So I am not sure why we cannot, with all of our sophistication, simply accept that we too understand and experience evil today in intensely personalized ways. It would greatly help us care for ourselves and for others if we did, even if we tried to”.
During Lent we become a new creation, he said. This new creation is to be in tune with the totality of the living creation because we are part of the totality – “its custodians and its wreckers all in one,” he contended. Archbishop Jackson concluded by suggesting that we can use Lent to change our focus on things that are real in order to cope in a complex scientific and spiritual world. “Our world has always contained more questions than answers and we need the power of prayer to take these questions as children of God and to do something with them,” he said.
You can read Archbishop Jackson’s reflection in full here.