March 4, 2009

Lent’s cross of ashes

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Pineapple fields outside of Ticuantepe.

I greet you from Nicaragua. During Lent we are moved to examine the fundamental acts that give sense to our lives. Last week, I spent Ash Wednesday with my family at an Ash Wednesday Mass listening to the homily of the priest of the parish in Ticuantepe in our neighborhood, which is surrounded by fields of multicolored flowers golden pineapples, and intensely red pitayas (a cactus fruit used to prepare refreshing beverages in the summer).

I was listening with attention to the insistent call of the priest exposing hypocrisy and calling us to reconcile with ourselves, our brothers, neighbors, couples, spouses, with the enemy, etc. It was a call to reinvent our lives, to transform ourselves with the love and healing grace which from this day, according to Saint Matthew's Gospel, Jesus Christ offers us. The church was full, and I could scarcely get in foot in the door at the main entrance to the church, which was occupied by a multitude. I moved to a side door to get a better view of the main altar and pulpit.

The crowd was expecting to receive a cross of ashes at the end of the Mass. Some young men and women, I realized, seemed to flee just at the moment when the priest began to put the crosses of ash on the forehead of every person.

Celebration of Lent in a Ticuantepe neighborhood.

This brought to mind an episode in one of the most popular works of Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, when on an Ash Wednesday all the Buendía brothers were murdered by a single shot in the forehead marked with the sign of the cross of ash. Only one of them survived; he inexplicably had not participated in the Mass. I wondered if those young men and women who left early had read One-Hundred Years of Solitude, or if their lives simply were not in need of review?

After Mass, my wife, my son, and my daughter began a long discussion about why those people who left early chose not to receive the cross? They seemed to agree that the answer lay in the words of the Priest: “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (NRSV Matt. 6: 5-6). Later, when I was alone, I thought that before we all came to the Mass, we were shouldering our own crosses.

We miss the opportunity to relieve our loads by accepting our faults and mistakes, which is the same as forgiving each other at this moment and forever. We miss the chance to be honest and accept that there are fundamental questions in our lives that make our positions seemingly irreconcilable.

We also wondered if everyone in church was really ready to put on the table all our heavy loads on the table with complete transparency?  This was a chance for transformation, which can be painful because we must recognize and declare our separation. But was this opportunity really lost?

The transformation to which we are called is an interior renovation, and each of us from the depths of our being could in our own time contemplate and examine our lives: Are we walking along the paths of the Lord carrying our own cross? Personally I felt the need to check which things I must change to be a better servant of Christ. How can I be really faithful to the people I love? Fortunately, the checklist is endless, which means that our interior voice will always be there to guide us in the path of holiness.

I hope that in writing this letter I can take a step toward the transformation of my life. The actions that we postpone today turn out to accumulate excessively and inevitably until we cannot ignore them.
It is difficult to sift through all that weighs us down and to celebrate God's word on this beautiful day of Lent, but it was really a profound experience for me. I rescued some sense of meaning in my efforts to arrange, to put my life in order. I heard a demand that I stop and examine and recommit my life.

I went home and looked for more light in the Bible and found that the morning’s reflection is based on the Matthew 6, which includes these verses: “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in Heaven. So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the strees, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (NRSV Matt 6: 1-4).

I hope this reading strengthens you during Lent, making us reflect with our interior voices, which are our own spiritual force given to us by God’s grace.

Carlos Cardenas M

The 2009 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 282