With the approach of Ash Wednesday on February 18th, the Church once again does something both startling and merciful: she reminds us that we shall die.

There is about this reminder a bracing honesty which our modern age sorely needs. We are encouraged, most days, to behave as though we were permanent fixtures in a very temporary world. We speak of plans and prospects, of improvements and entertainments, and seldom of endings. Yet on Ash Wednesday the priest marks our foreheads with ashes and speaks the plain truth: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is not cruelty. It is clarity. And clarity, in the hands of God, is always a form of kindness.

Lent, then, is not a season for religious theatrics, but for reality. The Church calls us to consider the Four Last Things—Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—not because she delights in severity, but because she desires our joy.

Death is the great appointment we all keep. It is not an interruption of the story, but its turning page. For the Christian, death is not the collapse of meaning but its unveiling. The One we have trusted in shadows we shall meet face to face. To remember death is not to become morbid; it is to become wise. Only when we grasp that our days are numbered do we begin to truly live.

Judgment, too, has been misunderstood. We imagine a cold tribunal and forget that judgment is the setting right of what has gone wrong. Every time we cry out against injustice, every time we long for truth to prevail, we are secretly longing for judgment. And the Judge is not a stranger but the very Christ who bore our sins. To stand before Him will be to stand before Love itself; it’s a love that burns away falsehood and heals what we have surrendered to Him.

Heaven and Hell stand as the two great possibilities before every human soul. Heaven is not a sentimental cloud, but the solid, blazing reality for which we were made. It is the fulfillment of every pure desire, the answer to every homesick ache we have ever felt in this world. Hell, on the other hand, is not so much a torture devised by God as the final monument to human refusal, the tragic end of a will that persistently says, “I will have my own way.” In the end, we are given what we have chosen.

Lent is the season in which we are invited to choose again.

Through prayer, we learn to desire God above lesser things. Through fasting, we discover how tightly we cling to what cannot save us. Through repentance, we unlock doors we have long kept barred. The ashes on our foreheads are not a sign of despair but of hope, hope that even dust may be raised to glory. As February 18th draws near, we would do well not to rush past it. Let us receive the ashes. Let us ponder the Last Things. Let us allow eternity to cast its searching and saving light upon our present lives.

For it is only in remembering that we shall die that we truly learn how to live. Only in facing judgment that we begin, at last, to desire Heaven.