A reflection for Ash Wednesday

The Revd Dr Peter Doll, Canon Librarian and Vice Dean, shares a message for Ash Wednesday.

Watch the video message above and read the full text below.

"The presence of seasons in the Church year can encourage Christians to think about the story of their faith in discrete chunks. Christmas is its own wintertime celebration, light in the darkness, very distinct from anything else. Easter we associate with the hope of new life in Spring.

In fact, the Christian faith does not fall into such neat boxes. All the seasons overlap with one another. Look, for example, at this altar painting in the Jesus Chapel, a reminder of Christmas and the visit of the three Wise Men to the infant Jesus. Here we find at least two prominent anticipations of Christ’s crucifixion. One of the Wise Men gives him a gift of myrrh, a spice associated with the burial of bodies. And baby Jesus is playing with another gift, a necklace of coral; its blood-red colour prefigures his suffering and death.

Lent in the popular mind occupies a space all of its own, a time we approach with a certain amount of apprehension. We ask one another, What are you going to give up for Lent? It is a time that brings out the inner Puritan in us. It has a very distinct and memorable beginning on Ash Wednesday; there is no more effective reminder of our mortality than being signed with a cross in ash on our foreheads.

In order to reinforce the seriousness of this time of preparation, the church building and its furnishings take on a particularly austere aspect. In the same way as we are asked to fast, to make do with less, during Lent, so the church building takes on a visual fast. Images and statues are veiled, altar pieces covered up. Here in the Jesus Chapel, the doors of the altar painting are shut.

We are deprived of the stimulation and inspiration that the painting provides. For a season we are challenged to make more of less.

Here in St Saviour’s Chapel the impact of Lent is even more dramatic. Here we have a large and dramatic altar-piece; its panels depict the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and the Crucifixion, as well as two saintly bishops.

When the doors are shut, their backs are revealed with stencilled decoration. This is in the mediaeval English tradition of the Lenten array, when all the vestments the clergy wear and the altar hangings are changed to unbleached linen, referred to as ash colour. They have stencilled decorations in black and red, here with the monogram of the Holy Name of Jesus and the Crown of Thorns. We are thus reminded to focus our prayer on the passion of Christ, that we may be prepared, if need be, to share in his sufferings, that we might come to share also in his Resurrection.

Through these changes, the Cathedral takes on a more serious aspect, but it is far from gloomy. Instead the tone of simplicity and lightness encourages us not to wallow with self-pity in our deprivations but to feel ourselves unburdened, lightened, and set free to make the journey with Christ to the Cross, the Tomb, and the joy of his Resurrection."