Contending with God: A Reflection on Ashes

Maddie Hajovsky, Terrain

March 12, 2025

My first Ash Wednesday service, I couldn’t find the parking garage. It was about a block away from the cathedral itself. After circling West-Campus's labyrinthine one-ways, I finally traced the source of the pious-looking foot traffic, parked my car, and joined the stream.  

I was a freshman in college. Back then, I thought if I could have struck my evangelical Christian upbringing with a mallet, it would have rung hollow. I didn’t feel like the Church of my youth had taught me anything worth remembering. Maybe a few truisms, but nothing to change my life. And I wanted it to change. I wanted something outside of my head to substantiate all of the agonizing over right and wrong that I had grown accustomed to, something to assure me that this struggle with myself was good for something. The ashes, at least, I thought, could tangibly change me—a physical marker of my anxious self-contending.  

I pulled back my hair. The pad of the alms bearer's thumb was startlingly soft as she applied the flaky soot. It had been worn smooth with repetition. “Repent and believe the Gospel,” she said. To the person behind me, I heard her pronounce in the same low tone, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Again and again, alternating from person to person, she repeated, repent and believe, remember that you are dust, repent and believe, remember that you are dust. 

To repent is to regret something deeply (1). In modern languages, the distinction between this and mere regret is that repentance prompts a change in behavior. The soul is so deeply grieved for its errors that redirection becomes an almost instinctual consequence. Every Ash Wednesday, though, I find myself wondering what mortality has to do with this.

Here is my best guess: there have been moments in my life that my helplessness, in grief or uncertainty or otherwise, has brought me to a state of paralysis. I lie in bed or put my head on the table and enter into a wordless reverie that teeters on the edge of sleep. I don’t know how to explain what happens in that state. My body shuts down. All that’s left are some essential faculties—and desperation. The part of me I call a soul goes to work on an answer to my helplessness, in a mixture of reason, recollection, and speechless outcry.   

The greatest release I have ever found in a state like this is when I come to the end of myself. I turn over every leaf of memory and every stone of my emotional landscape until I realize there is no answer to be found within me. I can do nothing. It’s at this point I wake from my stupor, clinging to God. 

Repentance is like this. It is a grief so deep that it propels us to the very edge of our awareness, to the very edge of our self-sufficiency, where we realize that we lack something. Usually, when it comes to repentance, that thing is love.   

But we are fickle. We forget that we are helpless—that we are going to die, that our bodies are in constant need of tending, that there is no answer inside of us to grief or uncertainty. Lent is a season of intentionally drawing close to the ways that we are not sufficient for ourselves. We fast for forty days, abstaining from a physical pleasure like dairy or coffee, to remind ourselves of our physical neediness. In doing so, we attempt to become more aware of our spiritual, moral, or mental deficits. In response, there is nowhere to turn but away from ourselves and into our need for a Savior. 

There is no better change in life than this. There is none more honest. It is a movement from self-contending to contending with God. So much, at least, is what I’ve learned from ashes.

Notes

1. Latin: re- (an intensifier) penitire (to regret)