Here are some images from Ash Wednesday at Saint Mary Cathedral in Lansing where hundreds of people attended Holy Mass to receive their ashes and to be challenged to embrace prayer, penance, and almsgiving during the next 40 days of Lent.

“We do not enter this Lenten season to be heroic or to prove something, much less to lose weight or add five minutes to our prayer time or to give a bit of money to someone in need,” said Bishop Earl Boyea of Lansing in his homily, March 5.

“Let the mark of ashes which we receive be a sign that we enter this season in order to empty ourselves of ourselves, to move ourselves off center, to provide an open space in our hearts and souls and bodies and lives so that God, who desires only one thing, can then fill us with his love and mercy and kindness.”

The act of putting on ashes symbolizes our fragility and mortality, and the need to be redeemed by the mercy of God. Far from being a merely external act, the Church has retained the use of ashes to symbolize that attitude of internal penance to which all the baptized are called during Lent.

The two formulas used on Ash Wednesday by those imposing ashes upon the forehead of penitents are: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” and “Repent, and believe in the Gospel”.

“God, through his Holy Spirit, wants to work wonders in us,” concluded Bishop Boyea, “Let us provide him with a clean canvas on which to draw, a cleared field in which to plant, a hungry, yearning heart to be filled. Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.”

• Additional material courtesy of the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy