Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. For Christians, it is a solemn day of fasting, repentance and prayer, marking the beginning of Lent and commemorating Jesus’s time in the wilderness. The practice of receiving ashes, usually traced by the priest or pastor as a cross on the forehead, is medieval, but its origins go back to the earliest Biblical times, when ashes were a sign of grief, sorrow and atonement.

Ashes are used throughout the Hebrew Bible, the words “sackcloth and ashes” occur in the Books of Job, Jeremiah and Daniel, while the Jewish freedom fighters, the Maccabees, prepared for battle by fasting, wearing sackcloth and sprinkling themselves with ashes.

As we in the West watch from afar the desperate struggle for survival of the Ukrainian people, an act of self-denial would be appropriate today. It need not take the form of fasting or involve the use of ashes, but those of all religions and none may still spend a little time in prayer or contemplation.

One could do worse than to read and ponder T.S. Eliot’s great poem “Ash Wednesday”, a Modernist meditation on repentance, hope and despair. Interwoven with his own lines are fragments of familiar prayers and Biblical verses: “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”; “may the judgement not be too heavy upon us”;  “Lord, I am not worthy”; “O my people, what have I done unto thee?” The poem ends with words taken from Psalm 102: “And let my cry come unto thee.”

Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”, fusing together the secular and the sacred, may serve as an ecumenical invocation, a prayer to any form of transcendence in which you may find meaning. Amid the images of death and destruction that fill our screens and acknowledging the fear that gnaws at our hearts — the fear that the violence now visited on Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson may spread to the rest of Europe or even the world — we can only raise our voices in supplication. What else, after all, is left to the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression, people very like us?

The fortunate ones are now abandoning everything and fleeing their homeland, at a rate of 100,000 a day; most have no choice but to stay and suffer. As the shells, bombs and missiles rain down, as the tanks crash through the streets and the death toll rises, to pray may seem futile. But it is not. Only the ability to find meaning in life and beyond life, even in death and suffering, distinguishes human beings from other creatures.

For us ashes are not merely ashes, but symbolic of our mortality and our humanity. We consign our mortal remains to the earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but we are blessed with the ability to transcend our earthbound nature. Death comes to us all, but war is not inevitable; we can honour its victims and confer meaning upon their sacrifice. When we say “never again”, we know that man’s inhumanity to man will recur, but we possess free will and we revolt against the irruption of evil into innocent lives.

On Tuesday a Russian missile attack on the TV tower in Kyiv also damaged the memorial complex at Babi Yar (or Babyn Yar, as it is now known), killing five civilians. There more than 33,000 Jews were massacred on Nazi orders in 1941, one of the largest single massacres in the Holocaust. The site was later the scene of further massacres of Soviet prisoners, Communists, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma, numbering in all more than 100,000 people during the German occupation. President Zelensky rightly drew attention to the implicit irony in this lethal attack, which gave the lie to Putin’s pretended war aim of “denazification”. During the Soviet era there was no memorial there, but in independent Ukraine several were built and it has become a place of pilgrimage.

One of the most famous poems of the Soviet era is Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar”. Shostakovich set these verses, published in 1961, to music in his 13th Symphony, as part of a bitter indictment of anti-Semitism, the harsh fate of ordinary people and the indifference of the Soviet bureaucracy to past horrors and present hardships. After identifying with the sufferings of Jews over millennia, Yevtushenko does not spare his fellow Russians, recalling their own pogroms and persecutions of Jews, long before the Nazi occupation. Then he appeals to their better nature, in words that seem apposite today:

O my Russian people!
I know
you
are international to the core.
But those with unclean hands
Have often made a jingle of your purest name.

Now, as never before, Russians have an opportunity to astonish the world by repudiating the abomination now being perpetrated in their name. Let us pray today, Ash Wednesday, for the deliverance of the Ukrainian people, but also for the enlightenment of the Russian people: that they may see, understand and refuse to allow their reputation to be dragged through the mud. Let Russians say, as Yevtushenko said of Jewish victims at Babyn Yar:

I am
every child
shot here dead.
Nothing in me
shall ever forget!

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.