Ash
Wednesday 2026
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall
return.”
Ash Wednesday is one of my favourite days of the year. Yes, I know I am somewhat perverse but it's an important day, an honest day. And I think it is because Ash Wednesday has a way of cutting through illusion.
No sentimentality. No spin. Just truth. We come marked with ash, stripped of
status and performance, reminded who we are — and who we are not.
The readings today are remarkably honest about
religion’s temptations. Isaiah thunders against a kind of fasting that looks
impressive but changes nothing. Paul speaks of hardship, contradiction, and
endurance rather than spiritual success. And Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, warns
us repeatedly against public virtue and private self-deception: praying to be
seen, fasting to impress, giving in ways that quietly inflate the ego.
Taken together, they suggest that Lent is not about adding
holy practices so much as removing the layers that keep us from truth.
Lent is about going inward — and being brave enough to look at what we find
there.
That inward journey is uncomfortable, because when we
look honestly inside, we encounter what earlier generations were unafraid to
name: demons. Not horned caricatures, but forces that pull us off course
— habits, desires, compulsions, resentments, fears — things that demand our
attention and drain our freedom.
The Church has traditionally gathered these forces
under the heading of the seven deadly sins: pride, vainglory, anger, avarice,
gluttony, lust, envy — and sometimes sloth. These are not merely bad
behaviours. They are distorted loves. They promise life and deliver captivity.
Angela Tilby, writing last week in The Church Times
reflects on the disturbing revelations surrounding The Jeffrey Epstein Files.
She recounts that rather chilling exchange, a recording of an interview between
Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon and Epstein, in which Bannon asked
Epstein whether he thought himself the devil. Epstein replied, “No, but I have
a good mirror.”
Whatever he meant, the remark is revealing. Epstein
understood the darker cravings of the human heart. He knew how to read people.
He knew how to exploit weakness — the hunger for power, prestige, sex, money,
belonging, admiration. Like the devil in the wilderness temptations, he did not
invent desire; he simply redirected it toward destruction.
As Angela Tilby writes, “Introductions to the
powerful, the paying off of unmanageable debts, seductive “massages”, the
thrill of forbidden sex, glamour, and fame — Epstein provided it all.” The
Epstein files have shone a terrible light on how weak and corrupt some in
public life have proven to be. The seven deadly sins are alive and well.
But here is the uncomfortable point: Lent is not about
identifying monsters out there. It is about recognising how those same
dynamics live, in smaller but still real ways, in us. That is why Jesus
insists that prayer, fasting, and giving be done in secret. Because the real
struggle is internal. The danger is not that others will see too much of our
virtue, but that we will fail to see our own captivity.
Fasting, then, is not spiritual dieting. It is not
punishment. It is resistance. We fast in order to notice what normally controls
us. What irritates us when it is removed. What noise rushes in to fill the
silence. We fast to discover what has been quietly feasting on us.
Isaiah makes this clear. The fast God chooses is one
that loosens bonds, breaks yokes, frees the oppressed — beginning with the
oppression that takes place within the heart. Lent is the season when we dare
to ask: What has a hold on me? Which demon gets my time, my imagination,
my energy, my money, my attention? Which voice tells me I am never enough — or
always entitled to more?
Writing in the same edition of The Church Times –
other reading material is available – Mark Oakley, the Dean of Southwark
cathedral reflects on his love of words and the doors that they open up onto
how we understand things. He mentions some of those words from other languages
for which we have no equivalent in English, like the Italian word for lingering
and talking long after a meal has finished, or that from and African language
for the ‘hahhaha’ sound we make when we have hot food in our mouths. There are
similar words in English that we should
make more of he argues and introduces a rare and beautiful word: respair.
A recovery from despair. Fresh hope. Not optimism, not denial, but a renewed
way of seeing. That’s a gear Lenten word.
Oakley suggests that our unhappiness often comes not
from lacking the best of everything, but from failing to make the best of what
we already have. That insight cuts straight across the deadly sins. Pride wants
superiority. Envy wants what others have. Avarice wants more. Gluttony wants
excess. Lust wants intensity without responsibility. Sloth wants escape.
Vainglory wants applause.
Respair, by contrast, is
the quiet rediscovery of sufficiency. Enoughness. Gratitude reclaimed from the
jaws of comparison and craving.
And this is where Lent becomes not merely penitential,
but liberating. Lent is not forty days of spiritual self-loathing. It is forty
days of truth-telling — in the presence of mercy. Paul writes, “Now is the day
of salvation.” Not once we have fixed ourselves. Not once we have conquered
every demon. But now — in weakness, endurance, patience, sorrow, and joy all
mixed together.
So perhaps the question for Lent is not, “What should
I give up?” but, “What truth am I being invited to face?” Which demon needs
naming? Which habit needs interrupting? Which desire needs reordering? And what
practice — fasting, silence, generosity, prayer — might create enough space for
God to do the healing we cannot do ourselves?
Ash Wednesday tells us we are dust. Lent tells us that
dust can be breathed upon by God and live. Whatever demon you decide to take on
in these forty days — pride or envy, anger or fear, excess or emptiness — may
this season bring you respair: not the best of everything, but the grace
to make the best of what you have, and to discover again the freedom God
desires for you.
Amen.
