Ash Wednesday
I want to be baptized
in ashes and dust
the way it was for me
with water.
More than a drop or a splash
across my forehead,
a wholehearted immersion
into the dirt
that signifies and sanctifies
my fleshy mortality
the earthen goodness of this body
that breathes
and builds
and becomes
even as it begins
to decay
and disintegrate.
I came from the good ground,
and when my watered days are done,
the good ground will take me back.
Bless me now
with this mark of welcome
and birth
of welcome
in death
of welcome
with every step
on sacred ground.
--
I haven’t always understood or observed Lent and Ash Wednesday, and I don’t claim to be proficient in observing or understanding them this year, but I might go so far as to say that for me, Ash Wednesday is the most meaningful day in the Christian liturgical calendar. Perhaps Ash Wednesday has become sacred because I have experienced loss in my thirties in ways that my younger self had been protected from. Perhaps it is because I no longer want to live forever and want the end of my life to be a future I do not fear. Perhaps it is also because I’ve witnessed new life up close and embrace that life cannot be sanitized or separated from the dirt and soil that births it.
In both Christian and Jewish contexts, ashes have long been used as a sign of grief and penitence. Ash Wednesday, and the words that often accompany ashes: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return”—invite recipients into a season of intentional reflection on our mortality, our humanity, and our brokenness. One of the few tangible links from one year to the next in the rhythm of the Christian seasons happens on Ash Wednesday, when the palm branches from the start of last year’s Holy Week have been burned to ashes and a pastor, minister, or caregiver of the community smears them on our foreheads.
Although it is not a sacrament, receiving ashes has become another place where the spiritual and the physical intersect for me. Like the Eucharist, it is an invitation to reflect and receive, to believe that something simple and insignificant—a cracker, a drop of wine, a smudge of dirt—can be so much more than that. Like at my baptism, where I am marked as part of a bigger whole, participating in both death and life. Where I am filled by the feast of the Eucharist, I begin Lent empty and hungry. Where I am reborn in baptism, through ashes, I am reminded that I am moving towards death.
I need these acts of connection between the world of beliefs and the physical world that I know only through the experiences of my body. Like many church people, I have spent much of my life toying with the gnostic heresy that the physical world is bad, and the “real” world is spiritual. Life, however, is both unavoidably and intentionally physical.
God has given us a world that is concrete and physical, a world that relies on death and decay to create new life, a world that is literally covered in dirt, a world that can be reduced to smudges of ash through fire.
And God declared this world good. Yes, it is marred by a brokenness that permeates all things, all systems, and all creatures and living beings. And it is rooted in a fundamental goodness. There is something good, something sacred, something blessed in the earthen-ness of our lives.
My life in twenty-first-century North America is incredibly sheltered from the rhythm of life and death that has marked the majority of human existence. This is not inherently a bad thing; I am grateful to exist in a time and location when penicillin and insulin are readily available, where infant mortality is not an inevitability for each family, and where many diseases have been virtually eradicated through the work of scientists, medical advances, and vaccinations. But it does mean that encounters with death and dying are minimized.
Last summer, I sat with my sister and my mother at my grandmother’s bedside. We knew it was a farewell visit, and I took a turn holding my grandma’s hands, gently stroking the baby-soft skin, afraid to hold too tightly in case I caused a bruise. Her breathing was laboured, and my aunt said the nursing staff would give her an injection shortly to quiet its tone; although the rattling sound was not causing my grandma pain, the sound of a “death rattle” is often uncomfortable for loved ones.
We sang to my grandma, and when we finished the short list she had made of hymns to choose from for her funeral, she stirred, opening her eyes and fidgeting in the bed. My sister, who was holding her hands, asked if she wanted us to sing again, and she looked directly into my sister’s face and said, “Again,” one of two clear sentences she spoke that afternoon. So we sang again. We sang hymns that spoke of reaching the Jordan River, of arriving on “the other side,” of reaching the end of our numbered days. We sang them through tears, knowing we were praying her towards an imminent transition, a mysterious and hopeful end to what we know as life.
It was a heartbreaking visit; it was beautiful, it was in moments awkward and strange. It was a sacred experience that I will never forget. My grandma died the following night in her sleep.
Not all deaths are peaceful like my grandma’s, after nearly ninety-six years of life. Many deaths come abruptly, in quantities too vast to count, or to people too young to have bodies that know how to die.
To the living, death is always a loss. We ought to mourn,grieve, wail, and rage.
Death is, to those of us living, always a threat. It is a threat because beauty, delight, the Incarnation, encounters with the Divine, forgiveness, mercy, grace, theosis, sanctification, and all that is holy are known to us in the midst of life, in the complicated dirt of reality, and in the ashes that come to us as remnants of the past.
For me, penitence, grief, and the Lenten journey begin with the ashes’ reminder that this life is sacred, these bodies are blessed, and that this dirt-covered earth is the home that God spoke into existence and filled until it was teeming with life, the home where Jesus was born and grew and ate and walked and spoke and healed and wept and died and returned to life, and the home where we carry the Spirit of God in one generation of bodies after the next.
A Prayer for Ash Wednesday
“Ashes and dust, we all fall down.
These bodies of ours will fade away
Til nothing is left but a smudge.
The smallest trace of life.
All our dreams and doings,
Our hopes and hollering.
One dirty smear for the eye to see -
And the invisible effects
Of how we lived:
The meals we shared
The time we gave
The slaves we loosed
And the reach of all we forgave.
From ashes to ashes,
From glory to glory,
May these dusty lives be lived.
May your name be on our lips.
May your kingdom come,
World without end. Amen.”
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