Ash Wednesday

The early Roman Catholic Church based its observance of Ash Wednesday on the Hebrew customs of repentance and mourning, wearing sackcloth and ashes, the ashes symbolizing the dust of which God made man: “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”—Genesis 2:7. The dust mentioned here foreshadows the ashes of repentance and penitence.
  >“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”—Genesis 3:19. When man chooses to sin, he turns away from God.
  “Job answered the Lord, and said,…I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”—Job 42:1, 5-6. Job had thought himself better (more upright) than average but when Satan tested him, he suffered until he repented his pride.
  Coming forth from the wilderness, Jesus began to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah: “The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”—Matthew 4:16-17. Jesus emphasized the need for repentance.
  “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.”—Matthew 11:21. Though Jesus taught and wrought miracles in Chorazin and Bethsaida, today they are ruins. Tyre and Sidon were heathen Phoenician cities.


“Repentance is returning to God completely.”—Edna Lister


  To recognize that you have sinned and to ask forgiveness of your sins are but the first steps in repentance, metanoia, which means “to turn around” or “to return” to God. “Now, saith the Lord, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”—Joel 2:11-13.
  Thus, repentance is not merely the act of turning to God, but of returning to God completely, to walk the Via Christa. We believe that the way Jesus lived his life is the way we should strive to live. The events of his life, the challenges to faith he faced, metaphorically symbolize the kinds of events and challenges that we must face as well.


Edna Lister on Ash Wednesday

From January 12 to Ash Wednesday is a period of repentance, during which you take soul inventory. Lent is a period of sacrifice or “remission of sins.” Soul inventory requires that you make choices and decisions. So under repentance, you prepare to become an initiate. "Remission" means that you return to God for your original mission, to make sacrifice to make room to be refueled with the Holy Spirit. During your "repentance" phase, you think about making sacrifices. From Ash Wednesday you ascend while in a consecrated state of Baptism by Water, to meet the Holy Spirit descending as a Baptism by Fire at Easter.—Edna Lister, Your Life Practice, May 23, 1954.


Ash Wednesday opens Lent, forty days of soul inventory. If you have not fully lived according to the law under this great release of Power, you repeat the October 20 to Christmas cycle. Each day is a day of judgment in a just appraisal of gains to prepare for sacrifice of self during Lent.
  Ash Wednesday opens the period of sacrifice of self, not of things. Since Twelfth Night, you have come through a period of soul searching to discover exactly where the last of earth-taints are in your life.
  Where do you search? You can go wrong in only three places, in your creative tools of desire, thinking and imagination.
  You know what old pictures you still build and remove them. You know where your thoughts betray you, and you surely know the depth and height of your own desires.
  What plans have you for your future ascension into the state of perfection, where you can count on yourself to hold steadfastly? How do you plan not only to control imagination, thinking and desires, but to conquer their old runaway betrayal of the soul?—Edna Lister, Healing the Lepers, February 28, 1965.


Forty days is a mystical period, a completed cycle. On Twelfth Night we open the forty days of soul inventory. Ash Wednesday begins forty days of sacrifice of things left undone. The disciples had various types of training, based on the sacrifice of Abraham, and the Law of Moses. Jesus taught them to sacrifice self, not an eye for an eye, etc., but to cover the transgressions of others.—Edna Lister, Mind Integrated with Power, May 17, 1970.


At Ash Wednesday, you are supposed to know what you want to sacrifice. “I know, I stand, I hold in Light” are magic words. Bring out your taints for lifting and develop the soul virtues. Stand and declare, “This is Light.” Look into the face of evil or criticism and say, “How beautiful you are.”—Edna Lister, November 3, 1970.

Top ↑




Edna Miriam Lister
1884—1971
The original Pioneering Mystic,
Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, Founder, Society of the Universal Living Christ, minister, teacher, author, wife, and mother.


Edna Lister


Ash Wednesday Origins: “The name dies cinerum (day of ashes), which it bears in the Roman Missal is found in the earliest existing copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary and probably dates from at least the 8th Century. On this day all the faithful according to ancient custom are exhorted to approach the altar before the beginning of Mass, and there the priest, dipping his thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead—or in case of clerics upon the place of the tonsure—of each the sign of the cross, saying the words: ‘Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.’ The ashes used in this ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year. In the blessing of the ashes four prayers are used, all of them ancient. The ashes are sprinkled with holy water and fumigated with incense.
  “There can be no doubt that the custom of distributing the ashes to all the faithful arose from a devotional imitation of the practice observed in the case of public penitents. But this devotional usage, the reception of a sacramental which is full of the symbolism of penance (cf. the cor contritum quasi cinis of the ‘Dies Irae’) is of earlier date than was formerly supposed. It is mentioned as of general observance for both clerics and faithful in the Synod of Beneventum, 1091 (Mansi, XX, 739), but nearly a hundred years earlier than this the Anglo-Saxon homilist Ælfric assumes that it applies to all classes of men. ‘We read’, he says, ‘in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.’"
—Herbert Thurston


References

The Holy Bible. King James Version (KJV).

Thurston, Herbert. “Ash Wednesday.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907.