We rise from the ashes with God, but without Him, we are dust. „Behold, now is the time fitting; behold, now is the day of salvation! (2 Cor 6,2). This statement of the apostle Paul helps us enter the spirit of Lent. Lent is a favorable time to return to the essentials, get rid of what weighs on us, reconcile with God, and rekindle the fire of the Holy Spirit, who dwells covertly among the ashes of our fragile humanity. Return to the essential. It is a time of grace to put into practice what the Lord asked us to do in the first verse of the Word we heard: “Turn to me with all your heart” (Jl 2,12). To return to the essential, which is the Lord. The Cinderella ceremony takes us on this return journey and addresses two challenges: to return to the truth about ourselves and to return to God and our brothers.
Above all, we are to return to the truth about ourselves. Cinderella reminds us of who we are and where we come from and leads us back to the fundamental reality of life: only the Lord is God, and we are the work of his hands. We have a life while He is life. He is the Creator, while we are the fragile clay in his hands’ shape. We come from the earth and need heaven, His; with God, we rise from the ashes, but without Him, we are dust. When we humbly bow our heads to receive the ashtray, let us remember in our hearts this truth: we are to the Lord, we belong to Him. For he „kneaded man from the dust of clay and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life“ (Gn 2.7): we exist because he breathed into us the breath of life. And as a gentle and merciful Father, he also experiences fasting because he longs for us, waits for us, and expects our return. And he always encourages us not to despair, even when we fall into the dust of our fragility and sin, „for he knows what we are made of, he remembers, that we are just dust“ (PS 103,14). Let’s hear it again: He remembers that we are just dust. God knows it; on the contrary, we often forget it and think we are self-sufficient, strong, and invincible without Him. We use make-up to think of ourselves as better than we are, but we are dust.
Lent is, therefore, a time when we remember who the Creator is and who the creature is when we proclaim that only God is the Lord, only He, when we get rid of the pretended self-sufficiency and eagerness to stand in the center and be the winners, when we take ourselves off the idea that only thanks to our abilities can we be the protagonists of life and transform the world around us. This is a favorable time to convert, to change our view of ourselves above all, to look within ourselves: how many distractions and superficialities distract us from what is essential, how many times do we focus on our appetites or what we lack, move away from the center of our hearts and forget to accept the meaning of our being in the world. Lent is a time of truth, discarding the masks we wear daily to look perfect in the eyes of the world; Lent is a time to fight falsehood and hypocrisy, not in others, but within ourselves, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel. They need to look in the face and wrestle.
However, there is a second step: the ashtray also calls us to return to God and our brothers. If we return to the truth about who we are and realize that our ego alone is not enough, we will find that we exist only through relationships: the original one with the Lord and the vital ones with other people. So, the Cinderella we receive on our heads today tells us that every assumption of self-sufficiency is false and that the deification of one’s self is destructive and locks us in a cage of loneliness. We look down in the mirror of supposed perfection, imagining that we are the center of the world. Our life, on the other hand, is above all a relationship: we received it from God and our parents, and thanks to the Lord and those who stand by our side, we can always renew and regenerate it. Lent is an opportune time for the revival of our relations with God and with others: to open ourselves in silence to prayer and to come out of the firmness of our closed ego, to break the shackles of individualism and, through meeting and listening – not through isolation – to rediscover those who walk beside us every day and learn to love them again as brothers and sisters.
Brothers and sisters, how can this be achieved? To make this journey happen and return to the truth about ourselves, God, and others, we are called to follow three main paths: alms, prayer, and fasting. They are classic means, but there is no need for news on this journey. Jesus made it clear: alms, prayer, and fasting. But it is not external ceremonies, as the Lord said, but gestures to express the renewal of the heart. Almsgiving is not a quick gesture to purify the conscience that would somewhat offset the internal imbalance, but means touching with one’s own hands and tears the suffering of the poor; prayer is not a ritual, but a dialogue of truth and love with the Father; fasting is not just a pious renunciation, but a powerful gesture that reminds our heart of what matters and what passes away. Jesus’ „ admonition retains adequate validity even for us: external gestures must always be matched by the sincerity of the soul and the inner connection of action. What is the use of tearing a garment, indeed, if the heart remains far from the Lord, that is from goodness and righteousness?“ (Benedict XVI, Ash Wednesday Homily, March 1, 2006). Too often, however, our gestures and rituals do not touch life, they do not form the truth; perhaps we do them only so that others admire us, to applaud us, to take credit. How many times does this happen? Let us remember this: in personal life, as in the life of the church, it does not matter the external appearance, human judgments, and pleasure of the world; it only depends on the point of view of God, who reads love and truth in it.
If we humbly stand before his gaze, then alms, prayer, and fasting will not remain external gestures but express who we are: God’s children and brothers to each other. Alms and merciful love will show our compassion for those in need and help us return to others; prayer will make our inner desire to meet the Father sound and make us return to him; fasting will be a spiritual gym to joyfully renounce what is useless and burdens us to become more free internally and return to the truth about ourselves—meeting the Father, inner freedom, compassion.
Dear brothers and sisters, let’s bow our heads, accept the ashtray, and brighten our hearts. Let us embark on the path of love: we are given forty opportune days to remind ourselves that the world is not to be enclosed within the narrow confines of our personal needs and to rediscover joy not in things which we are to accumulate but from caring for those who are in need and tribulation. Let us embark on a journey in prayer: we are given forty opportune days to provide God with the primacy in our lives again, to dialogue with him with all our hearts, and not in the rest of time. Let us embark on fasting: we are given forty opportune days to rediscover ourselves, to limit the dictatorship of the planning diaries, which are always full of things to do, the demands of an increasingly superficial and cumbersome ego, and they choose what matters.
Brothers and sisters, let us not dispel the grace of this holy time: let us look at the cross and go; let us respond generously to the substantial challenges of Lent. At the journey’s end, we will meet the Lord of life with greater joy, who gives us to rise from the ashes.
