For many in our CatholicCare community, attention has been drawn to the beginning of the season of Lent, marked by the celebration of Ash Wednesday.
The intent behind the Lenten season is an invitation to think about Easter, some 40 or so days away. What might be some of the broader, universal, dimensions of this time in the Christian calendar?
I’m often struck by the place of ritual and ceremony in our lives. I think about the many gatherings I’ve been to over the years that begin with a smoking ceremony, led by an Elder of the local owners of the land on which we stand.
I am always moved to tears because in that moment, I experience a powerful gesture of welcome and invitation to come to this ceremony with a humble receptivity to the gift of smoke being offered – captured evocatively in the encouragement to weave one’s hands through the smoke and be cloaked by its power to enliven and heal.
In this ceremony, I get the sense that there is also the invitation to share the lived experience of oppression and hope of all first nations people.
In the midst of our diversity in cultural heritage across CatholicCare Victoria, we draw on the respective rituals, ceremonies, and symbols that say something about how we understand ourselves in our complicated world today.
We draw on the stories that have in some way or other defined us.
I learnt recently, from one of our prison chaplains in a reflection that she was leading, that the Cinderella story is about much more than “happily ever after”!
There is something in this fairy tale that has resonance with the Ash Wednesday ritual of having ashes smudged on the forehead, accompanied by the haunting words, “remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return…”
The name “Cinder (ashes) -ella” literally means “the young girl who sits in the cinders or ashes.” She slept by the hearth in the ashes where her stepmother sent her to be humiliated.
Before the glass slipper, the ball gown, the prince, and the happily ever after, there was a time of doing it tough.
With the help of her Fairy Godmother, who happens to be the former beggar who she helped, Cinderella is able to be transformed. Soon she is taken out of the ashes from the chimney, and goes on to the castle for the Ball and into the arms of the prince.
Psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, novelists, theologians, and tellers of ancient oral stories – all storytellers alike, draw on these deeply evocative myths and parables sometimes referred to as the hero’s or heroine’s journey.
The narrative arc is well known: youth and inexperience, a calling to seek out the truth that is bigger than oneself, a period of being stretched to one’s limits, a symbolic or literal experience of dying, ending with the return to newness of life and purpose. Does Lord of the Rings come to mind for anyone?
Many of our people who we walk with in our work, are doing it tough. Perhaps, too, theirs is a journey of descent, of being smudged, without lustre – at least this is how it might often feel.
In our own understated and non-intrusive way, what we might bring to our encounter with others is the bigger story: the story of life, of being smudged by the ashes of life’s many challenges and, the experience of new life and of redemptive hope.
Life finds a way!
Paul Zammit | Senior Manager, Pastoral Care
Read more: