Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we can see if the strangers we meet in street and store are Catholic—at least we can see who went to Mass to get their Lent started. While the black ashes clearly mark the brows of the baptized, it isn’t clear to most of those baptized and ashed who it was that began this grim yet gritty liturgical tradition recalling “the way to dusty death,” as Macbeth put it.
The first man to smear Lenten ashes on the foreheads of the faithful did so not only as a reminder that we are dust and to dust we must return, but also to proclaim that it is from the ashes that we will rise again. It was one who was no stranger to suffering, service, and the struggle over crumbling culture and lost souls—and with the steely determination to do something about it with prayer and penance. The ashes of Ash Wednesday come to us from no less a personage than Pope St. Gregory the Great.
In 601, three years before he died at 64, Pope Gregory set the day for the beginning of Lent as 46 days before Easter. His reasoning was to establish 40 days of fasting while including six feast days on the Sundays—for in Gregory’s words, “Who bends the knee on Sunday denies God to have risen.” This was when a Wednesday became the beginning of Lent, and Pope Gregory marked that Wednesday by marking his flock with ashes in the form of a cross, according to the ancient pagan and biblical tradition denoting mourning.
Ash Wednesday is a perfect icon of Pope Gregory’s totally down-to-business and somewhat down-in-the-mouth Catholicism. In his own day, fourteen hundred years ago, Gregory was convinced he was living in the end times—and he would certainly have that opinion were he living today. We may not have to deal with marauding Lombards, but we are under attack by wilder breeds of barbarian. And though Gregory showed us what it means to be great, it was in his sacrificial determination to see God’s will through that he did so, making his whole life a Lent.
Born to a Roman Senator, Gregory’s Italy was languishing under the botched conquests of the late Emperor Justinian, famine, disease, bureaucratic corruption, and educational collapse. Gregory received a rigorous training in the liberal arts and a thorough course in religious studies to prepare him for a promising political career as a Prefect of Rome. But his secular formation drove him to a Benedictine monastery, where Gregory found peace in the simplicity and structure of monastic life.
Distinguished for his intelligence and learning, Gregory the monk was commanded by Pope Benedict I to become a deacon of Rome. Soon after, Pope Pelagius II sent Gregory the deacon to Constantinople to be a papal emissary. When Gregory the emissary tried to sneak back to his abbey to be a monk again, he was made a papal secretary. When Pelagius died, Gregory the secretary was pressed to become pope. Though Gregory refused the holy office, appealing to the Byzantine Emperor and even fleeing Rome, Gregory could not escape. The people would not allow it—and neither would God. Gregory became pope.
Though unwilling, Gregory proved one of history’s most active, most influential, and most beloved popes and political leaders. Though disinclined to do great works, Pope Gregory’s devotion to do good works won him greatness. From dining with beggars every day to embodying his self-given title “servant to the servants of God,” Gregory was a pope who knew what it meant to love when the going got tough. Though he was hesitant to rise to the occasion of worldly opportunity, he never hesitated to rise to the occasion of heavenly charity.
And all this is why it is so fitting that Gregory stands as a founder of the Lenten tradition. The humility to lower oneself, to accuse oneself, to acknowledge personal fault and spiritual filth, is to be great as Gregory was great—and it is a mystery at the heart of Gregory the Great’s reluctant rise to papal power. It is a mystery embraced in following the Lenten standard of St. Gregory in the ashy cross he gave to the Church. The reluctance to be great is a measure of both sanctity and sanity, and it is therefore a cause for greatness through meekness.
As anyone who has taken Lent seriously knows, meekness is not weakness. It is the noble desire to sit at the lowest place, to deny oneself for the sake of Christ and neighbor. It is strength. Though the meek refrain from resisting evil with force, they overcome it with patient and enduring goodness. The meek are those whose reason guides impulse, restraining anger. They are not freed from anger but possess the will to control it. In this lies strength, virtue, and greatness.
For all its undesirable disciplines, Lent is all about desire: the desire for eternal life. The ashes are our sooty reminder of all that is desirable beyond the dust. Gregory was keenly aware of that; and, if he was great in any way, he was great in the desire for God. Benedictine monk and theologian Jean Leclercq called St. Gregory the “Doctor of Desire,” referring to Gregory’s philosophy that asceticism was a preparation for the desire for God—a training, or cultivation, of desire.
What more should we prepare for on Ash Wednesday? Speaking of sackcloth and ashes, there is a passage in the Book of Job that echoes Elijah’s famous experience where he searches for the Lord in a hurricane, in an earthquake, and in a fire, but he only finds Him in a gentle breeze. Job reads, “There stood one whose countenance I knew not, an image before my eyes, and I heard the voice, as it were, of a gentle wind.” In this murmur, this hidden word, Gregory heard the opening of a lovers’ dialogue. “This inspiration touches the human mind,” he writes, “and by touching lifts it up and represses temporal thoughts, inflaming it with eternal desires.”
