Church tradition identifies seven penitential psalms: Psalm 6, Psalm 32, Psalm 38, Psalm 51, Psalm 102, Psalm 130, and Psalm 143. So here we are with Psalm 143, the last of the seven penitential psalms.
Psalm 143 is included in the list for its opening lines and their recognition of universal sinfulness:
Lord, hear my prayer.
In your faithfulness listen to my plea,
and in your righteousness answer me.
Do not bring your servant into judgment,
for no one alive is righteous in your sight.
It’s a fitting reflection here at the start of Lent.
I’ve shared this before, but in my spaces there is a struggle to recognize Lent as a penitential season. Lent has, rather, drifted into pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism.
What do I mean by pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism?
Well, you likely saw this all over social media last week with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. In these posts, notes, tweets, photos, and short videos, we’re told that Lent is the season where we “face our mortality.” During Lent we “face our finitude.”
People get this idea, of course, from the words of Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It seems straightforward. We’re told to remember we are dust, so we contemplate our mortality.
The bit being left out is where the words of Ash Wednesday come from. They come from Genesis 3 and are the words of the curse placed upon Adam and Eve for their sin. Yes, we’re remembering we are dust, but we’re also calling to mind our complicity in bringing about this curse. This is why we don’t smear dirt on our heads, but ashes. Ashes are a sign of grief and sorrow. Dirt would be an existential sign. Ashes, by contrast, are a penitential sign. Ashes preach the sermon of Psalm 143: “No one alive is righteous in your sight.”
When Lent loses this penitential aspect it becomes, as I said, pop existentialism, pop Stoicism, and pop Buddhism. Calls to “contemplate your mortality” run through these traditions:
From the Stoic Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
From Stoic Epictetus’ Enchiridion: “Set before your eyes every day death and exile and everything else that looks terrible, especially death. Then you will never have any mean thought or be too keen on anything.”
From the Dhammapada, a core summary of the Buddha’s teaching: “All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.”
From the Satipatthana Sutta, concerning the Buddhist practice of corpse contemplation as a mindfulness practice: “This body of mine, too, is of the same nature as that body [the decaying corpse], is going to be like that body...”
Concerning pop existentialism, the title of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death describes all the psychological and social pathologies that result when we repress our awareness of death.
Let me be quick to say here that memento mori practices have a rich tradition within Christianity. Facing our mortality is an important practice. Just a few selections from the Bible:
Ecclesiastes 7:2: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, since that is the end of all mankind, and the living should take it to heart.”
Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days carefully so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.”
Psalm 103:14–16: “For he knows what we are made of, remembering that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass—he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over it, it vanishes, and its place is no longer known.”
Job 14:1–2: “Anyone born of woman is short of days and full of trouble. He blossoms like a flower, then withers; he flees like a shadow and does not last.”
Sirach 7:36: “In all you do, remember that you must die, and you will never sin.”
James 4:13–14: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.”
Contemplating our mortality is important. So, insofar as Ash Wednesday brings that mortality into view, it’s all to the good. My concern is how, when the penitential aspect is lost, Lent becomes disembedded from the Christian story. Lent becomes a generic “spiritual-but-not-religious” practice.
Not to pick on Kate Bowler, but her reflections on Lent were shared widely within my circle. See this Instagram video and these reflections from her Substack. A selection:
Ash Wednesday has never been subtle. It begins with dirt. Ash smeared across foreheads. Words that refuse optimism: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. No pivot. No lesson tied up with a bow. Just an embodied reminder that fragility is our baseline...First, notice the subtle conflation of "dirt" with "ash" across the second and third sentences. In point of fact, dirt is not rubbed on your head. The penitential symbolism of ashes is nudged aside to fit the new framing. Lent is no longer about sin but about our embodied fragility. Lent is about our limits, and that we can’t outrun them. All this is true, but it’s missing Genesis 3 and Psalm 143. And here a rupture with the Christian story regarding Lent becomes explicit:
Ash Wednesday marks the start of that journey, when the church tells the truth about our limits out loud—using ash because words alone won’t do.
Lent doesn’t promise relief. It doesn’t offer a five-step plan for transcendence. It simply invites honesty. Forty days to stop pretending that we are fine, that we are in control, that we can outrun our limits with enough discipline or optimism.
I am not unfinished because I’ve done something wrong. I am unfinished because I am alive.
But first—dirt will be rubbed on our foreheads.
We tell the truth. We are tired. We are longing. We are not finished.
So welcome to Lent, my dears. The ache is not going away.
But neither, somehow, is grace.
