«Dear, ashes in the head and water on the feet. Between these two rites, the path of Lent is winded. A road, apparently, just under two meters. But, in truth, much longer and tiring. Because it is a question of starting from your head to get to the feet of others.
The forty days ranging from the Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday are not enough to travel it. A whole life is needed, of which the Lenten time wants to be the reduction in a scale. Repentance and service. These are the two great sermons that the Church entrusts to ashes and water, rather than words. There is no believer who is not seduced by the charm of these two sermons. The others, those made by the pulpits, perhaps forget immediately. These, however, no: because it expressed with the symbols, which speak a “long conservation language”.
It is difficult, for example, to escape the impact of that ash. Although very light, it goes down on the head with the violence of hail. And transforms that reference to the only thing that matters into an authentic one: “Convert and believe in the Gospel”. (…) That “Shampoo at the ash”Anyway, remains imprinted forever: Well beyond the time when, in the soft hair, you find you terrified debris that the following morning, scattered on the bacon, make you think for a moment of the scales already fallen from the crusts of our sin.
The ash burns us on the head
So even that tinkling of water in the basin remains indelible forever. It is the oldest preaching that each of us remember. As children, we “heard it with the eyes”, full of amazement, after draining between one hundred hips, to pass in the front row and spy closely the emotions of the people. A preaching, that of Holy Thursday, built with twelve identical phrases: but without monotony. Rich in tenderness, although divided into a predictable script. Without rhetoric, despite the repetition of discounted passages: the offertory of one foot, the washing of a jug, the blending of a dryer, the seal of a kiss. A strange preaching.
Because to pronounce her speechless, genuflected in front of twelve symbols of human poverty, he is a man who reminds his mind only in front of consecrated hosts. Mirage or fading? Blinds caused by sleep, or symbol for those who watch in the wait of Christ? “One -off” for the evening of the paradoxes, or plastic handbook for our daily choices? Evocator power of the signs! We then undertake the Lenten journey, suspended between ash and water.
The ash burns us on the head, as if it had just left the crater of a volcano. To turn off the ardor, let’s put in search of the water to be poured on the feet of others. Repentance and service. Obliged tracks on which the path of our return home must slide. Ash and water. Primordial ingredients of the laundry of the past. But above all, symbols of a complete conversion, which wants to finally grab us from head to toe.
(Source: from head to feet, in LVD, Molfetta, 1989, n. 1, p. 15-17)
