“Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. Repent and believe the Gospel.”
The liturgy of Ash Wednesday places before the Church a truth that is at once sobering and profoundly liberating. “Remember that you are dust.” Humanity is dust—finite, vulnerable, radically dependent on God. Yet this incompleteness is not a defect in our humanity. It is its openness. Our fragility is not a curse; it is the very space where grace can dwell. Human limitation, rightly embraced, becomes a threshold to transcendence.
Human limitation, rightly embraced, becomes a threshold to transcendence.”
God meets us not in our illusions of self-sufficiency but at the deepest level of our poverty—where we know we are in need of mercy, meaning, and ultimacy. We are indeed earthy, marked by contingency and weakness. Yet this dust is addressed by God. It is summoned to repentance. It is invited to believe. The ashes do not merely announce mortality; they announce relationship. They proclaim that Lent is not a season of self-condemnation but a season of return—return to the One in whom our lives began and toward whom they are ultimately directed.
Pope Leo XIV’s Lenten message unfolds precisely within this horizon of return. Lent, he writes, is a time to “place the mystery of God back in the center of our lives.” To return to God, therefore, is not primarily about multiplying devotions or intensifying religious performance. It is about re-centering. It is about rediscovering that God is our origin and our destiny, the source of meaning and the fulfillment of hope. It is a rediscovery of the ancient spiritual grammar of exitus-reditus: we come forth from God, and we journey back to God. Within this sacred circularity lies the rhythm and rhyme of existence.
There is something frightening about contemplating our finitude and finality. To stand before the truth of our limitations can unsettle us. Yet in faith, that same truth becomes liberating. When one dares to place one’s hand in the hand of God, fragility is no longer despairing. It becomes trust. The One who formed us from dust becomes our light, our help, and our salvation. In returning to God, we do not diminish our humanity; we allow it to be fulfilled.
When God is displaced from the center, life becomes fragmented. The heart is consumed by anxieties, distractions, and the relentless noise of competing voices. We live on the surface of things. We forget who we are. The ashes recall us to humility. They remind us of our precarity but also of our utter dependence on divine mercy. In this sense, return is not regression. It is restoration. It is a return to truth—to being human again before God, who alone can transfigure and transform us through grace and abundant love that flows endlessly from the Cross.
When God is displaced from the center, life becomes fragmented.”
Pope Leo structures his message around listening. Every path of conversion, he says, begins by allowing the Word of God to touch the heart. Listening is not passive. It is the first act of love. It is the willingness to allow another—ultimately God—to address us and transform us. In revealing himself to Moses, the Lord declares, “I have heard the cry of my people.” The God who calls us to listen is first the God who listens, the God who liberates, the God who heals; the God who saves; and the God who teaches and shows us the way, truth, and life.
To return to God, therefore, requires entering the inner self with courage. It demands honest questions. What is the false self that has kept us from our true self? What habits, sins, and fears have alienated us from love? What wounds lie buried beneath busyness and distraction? Listening to the Word also means listening to conscience, to hidden pain, to our sins and broken relationships, and to the quiet whisper of grace that invites us to change and a new way.
Pope Leo pushes listening beyond interiority. Sacred Scripture teaches believers to recognize and respond to “the cry of those who are anguished and suffering.” The condition of the poor is itself a cry that challenges societies, systems, and even the Church. Lent cannot be reduced to private spirituality. The return to God must open outward into solidarity. To hear God’s Word is to hear the wounded but also to listen to that inner child in us that is desperately searching to be heard and to be nurtured. To encounter divine mercy is to become an agent of mercy.
Fasting emerges in this light as a discipline of desire. It is not an arbitrary deprivation. It is a way of recognizing what we truly hunger for. Human beings already practice forms of discipline in daily life—abstaining for health, training, or protest. Lent invites these natural gestures to be embraced for spiritual reasons. When believers fast, they confess dependence. They acknowledge that life is sustained not by bread alone but by God.
Drawing on Saint Augustine, Pope Leo reminds the Church that hunger expands the soul. To hunger and thirst for justice in this life is to stretch the heart toward its fulfillment in the next. Fasting purifies appetite and redirects longing toward what truly satisfies. It frees desire from complacency and from the tyranny of immediate gratification. Properly lived, fasting enlarges humanity. It increases the capacity for God and for neighbor.
The Pope proposes a strikingly contemporary form of fasting: abstinence from words that wound. In an age marked by harsh speech, polarization, and digital aggression, the call to disarm language becomes profoundly evangelical. Refraining from slander, rash judgment, gossip, false witness, and speech that humiliates is itself a Lenten sacrifice. It is a way of returning to love. Words can build or destroy communion. To fast from harmful language is to allow hope and peace to take root where resentment once flourished. It is also to allow the Word of life to truly take flesh in our hearts, homes, and in the world.
This purification of speech reveals that conversion is not merely internal. It touches relationships. It reshapes families, parishes, communities, and public discourse. The return to God must heal the fractures that sin has introduced into human interaction, especially through harmful and deceptive words. It must restore the capacity to see goodness in others and beauty in the world and beauty conveyed through kind words.
Lent also unfolds as a communal pilgrimage. The Scriptures recall how the people gathered to listen to the Law and to fast together in order to renew their covenant. Conversion, then, is not an isolated achievement. It concerns the quality of shared life. Parishes and families are invited to become spaces where the cry of the poor finds welcome and where attentive listening opens paths to liberation. The journey toward Jerusalem is walked together.
At the heart of this journey stand the theological virtues. Prayer expresses faith—a trust in divine providence. Fasting embodies hope—a longing stretched toward fulfillment. Almsgiving manifests love—self-gift extended until it hurts, modelled after the self-gratuitous sacrifice of the Lamb that was slain. These are not slavish obligations but graced opportunities. They are the ordinary practices through which believers cooperate with God’s transforming love.
The Lenten path, as Pope Leo suggests, leads with Christ toward the mystery of his passion, death, and resurrection. Return to God is ultimately a return to this Paschal rhythm. It is a willingness to let falsehood die, to let pride be humbled, to let fear be surrendered, so that new life may emerge. The ashes trace the sign of the cross upon fragile foreheads, reminding believers that dust is destined for glory.
Lent, therefore, is grace. It is a sacred walk-in where God’s unrestricted love meets human unquenchable desire for God. It invites a return to roots, authenticity, and communion. It summons believers to listen more deeply, hunger more rightly, speak more gently, and love more generously. In returning to God, one does not lose oneself. One finds oneself healed, expanded, and reoriented toward the One who is both beginning and end. Dust touched by mercy becomes the dwelling place of hope. And the forty-day journey becomes a doorway into the liberating and saving presence of God. May we journey together with the Lord and with one another to the Paschal Feast prepared for us at Easter—a foretaste of what awaits us when our earthly pilgrimage is done.
In returning to God, one does not lose oneself. One finds oneself—healed, expanded, and reoriented toward the One who is both beginning and end.”