Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent in the Catholic church, and marks the beginning of this forty day liturgical period of prayer and fasting. Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads as a sign of repentance to God. The ashes used are typically gathered after the palms from the previous year's Palm Sunday are burned. I liked how Jeffrey Tucker links the significance of putting ashes on our foreheads to Sacred Music of the church.
Catholics come even in the absence of a mandate in order to experience them. And we do so because we adore the perceivable marks of our faith. We adore the ritual. We adore those features of the faith that underscore features of the physical world that make our very lives sacramentals. Our faith is not just abstract. It is real.
A hugely important aspect of this, but one sadly neglected in our time, is our music. Catholic music is like the ashes on our forehead, a very old tradition with timeless meaning for lives. It is a physical sign of something much deeper. Ashes are visible evidence of the invisible. Catholic music is the audible sign of the inaudible. It is something we should hold on to, cling to in order to give the daily march of our lives a spiritual meaning.
A hugely important aspect of this, but one sadly neglected in our time, is our music. Catholic music is like the ashes on our forehead, a very old tradition with timeless meaning for lives. It is a physical sign of something much deeper. Ashes are visible evidence of the invisible. Catholic music is the audible sign of the inaudible. It is something we should hold on to, cling to in order to give the daily march of our lives a spiritual meaning.
Read more about it here...
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