18/02/2015

Good morning. I once went to the Scots College in Rome, which trains men for the priesthood, and one of the students told me that he had been brought up in a predominantly Roman Catholic town and had come to Rome before he met his first Protestant. My experience was that I had to go to university in Glasgow before I started to make friends who were Roman Catholic and learn from them. One of them was called Jim. He was a good deal older than I was, already studying for his second degree, and he excelled as a university debater.

One morning I met him on the staircase of the students union, quite early. “Jim, you’ve got a dirty mark on your forehead”. Very gently he pointed out to this Protestant minister’s son that it was Ash Wednesday and he had been to mass and the priest had rubbed ash onto his forehead: a sign of penitence and human mortality at the start of the solemn season of Lent. 

On Ash Wednesday there’s a traditional penitential procession led by the Pope to the Basilica of Santa Sabina where ashes are sprinkled on the Pope’s head and he then places ashes on the heads of others. 

When I was a student, I knew a very old and very wise minister. Every time someone said to him “Oh I’m sorry”, he liked to reply “There’s no need for sorrow: just for amendment of life”. How much easier it is, often, to wallow in a self-obsessed preoccupation with our own wrongs rather than decide to do something to put them right. 

When the great reformation figure Martin Luther was going through the agonies of someone who believed he was the greatest sinner who ever lived, he heard a voice saying: “Don’t be silly, little man, you’re nothing of the kind”. 

Loving God, show us the way of appropriate confession and proper forgiveness. Amen.