Lent — Prayer for Ash Wednesday

The Lent (in Latin quadragesima, forty) begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts forty days until Holy Thursday — in memory of the forty days of Christ’s fast in the desert before the beginning of his public life (Mt 4:1-11). It is the strong time of preparation for Easter, marked by the three traditional penitential exercises: prayer, fasting and almsgiving (cf. Mt 6:1-18). The rite of the imposition of ashes, on the opening Wednesday, has the priest pronounce over each member of the faithful the ancient biblical formula: «Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris» — «Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return» (cf. Gen 3:19); or the evangelical alternative «Repent and believe in the Gospel» (Mk 1:15). This prayer accompanies the reception of the ashes and opens the forty days.

(After receiving the ash on the forehead:)

Lord God, author of my life and judge of my works, I receive in this rite the ash which reminds me of two simple and forgotten truths: my mortality — «thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return» — and my vocation to conversion — «repent and believe in the Gospel».

For these forty days, grant me the grace of the three exercises which your Son taught in the Sermon on the Mount: to pray more and in silence, especially before the Tabernacle and at the Adoration of Friday; to fast sincerely, not only from food as the ecclesiastical law commands on Ashes and on Good Friday, but also from digital distractions, from sterile pleasure, from useless words; and to give alms generously to the poor, giving of my necessary, not only of the superfluous.

May this Lent be, for me, an occasion of a well-prepared sacramental confession — perhaps the first after a long time. May I reconcile in my little world what is in rupture: within the family, at work, with the estranged.

Lead me, Lord, by the hand of the ashes until the morning of the Easter Vigil. May I arrive at the holy night in which we shall sing the Exsultet with the soul raised again, baptised anew in pardon, ready to renew the baptismal promises.

Through Christ our Lord.

Amen.