"When one desires Justice for its own Self and Others"
Notes on "Ash Wednesday" and the start of Lent
"Lent is the time to start breathing again. It is the time to open our hearts to the breath of the One capable of turning our dust into humanity. It is not the time to rend our garments before the evil all around us, but instead to make room in our life for all the good we are able to do. It is a time to set aside everything that isolates us, encloses us and paralyzes us. Lent is a time of compassion, when, with the Psalmist, we can say: “Restore to us the joy of your salvation, sustain in us a willing spirit”, so that by our lives we may declare your praise (cf. Psalms 51:12.15), and our dust – by the power of your breath of life - may become a “dust of love”."
Perhaps, in relation to this meaningful post, this writer, like others concerned, urges everyone to open hearts, minds, doors for those who would like to spend their Lent in breathing and turning ashes to "dust of humanity" that encompasses every issues particularly those of the repressed. For this Ash Wednesday, let everyone remember what true fasting and penitence means, as according to Isiah 58:6, it says:
"No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people".
It is usual to describe Ash Wedensday as a start to reflect and renew as christians being the start of Lent, but, Ash Wednesday is also a recognition of materialism within Christianity itself, for it defies the narcissism of atheism and at the same time recognizes the material existence of body from the bottom of nature (soil). For sure everyone recalls Genesis 3:19 (King James Version) as it says:
"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."
Such truth has made that verse as part of the dialectic of nature that everyone is a subject and be subjected in the process of totality, that everyone are born divine but rather experiencing earthly torment; right is someone who said that mankind are not Gods but rather a shit coming from the anus of God. Sounds realtalk isn't it? After all, Ash Wednesday is an anti-humanist theology at its finest, for in the end, man will go back to nature (Christianity and Hegel), as ashes, dust.
But in this time being as living creatures given reason and will, perhaps it is time to express concern others the way one expresses its own concern as a sinner. In a society wherein repression and injustice as predominant, self-mortification isn't enough as a Christian. Who does not want life and happiness? For sure everyone is afraid of pain and suffering, of loneliness and meaninglessness. But reality has made everyone in the process of seeking happiness end up with more misery; as one may lose its direction, sometimes get hurt and disillusioned in the process. This seems like is a contradiction.
But in these realities one has to make a realisation that life has to be face and act upon than leaving it for nothing. To move on without putting justice makes justice meaningless as any other ideal that is reduced into mere words and scraps of paper, as those who "move on" are motivated by a false quest for eternal happiness, escaping from the reality of suffering and its torments.
And like Christ whose life as consists of service driven by a desire to save souls, a person driven by reality (besides those of faith and morality) has to heed the call of many and its concerns ranging from an end to extrajudicial killings, drug abuse, to those of calls for genuine land reform and a just peace to create an atmosphere of realised hopes, the way Christianity's simplest calls has made everyone to join Christ instead of engaging in rituals as those of Caesars and of the High Priests.
But in these realities one has to make a realisation that life has to be face and act upon than leaving it for nothing. To move on without putting justice makes justice meaningless as any other ideal that is reduced into mere words and scraps of paper, as those who "move on" are motivated by a false quest for eternal happiness, escaping from the reality of suffering and its torments.
And like Christ whose life as consists of service driven by a desire to save souls, a person driven by reality (besides those of faith and morality) has to heed the call of many and its concerns ranging from an end to extrajudicial killings, drug abuse, to those of calls for genuine land reform and a just peace to create an atmosphere of realised hopes, the way Christianity's simplest calls has made everyone to join Christ instead of engaging in rituals as those of Caesars and of the High Priests.