Wednesday Wonder

Feb 17, 2010

Some have called it the most uncomfortable day of the year. And on many levels Ash Wednesday is exactly that. As the first day of the season of Lent this observance speaks with an uncompromising voice: life is broken and has a limited shelf life. Anyone who has lived more than a little knows that both of those things are true without a doubt. But the truest things are often those we most avoid.

Ash Wednesday services gather small attendance not only because it falls mid-week, or because our anti-depressant culture finds it a downer. The crowds are few and far between because we actually look our estrangements in the eye. We name the ways in which we are alienated from God, from the deepest aspects of ourselves, and from our neighbors. We dare admit our inclination to cave in upon ourselves, persisting in the belief that the world should somehow orbit us.

Ash Wednesday attendance is also scarce because we dare utter the D word. Death comes to us all, says the ancient liturgy, and there is no getting around it. That is not a particularly cheerful thought, especially for those of us who love life. But the truest things in life are not necessarily the most cheerful. That is why the Palms from the previous Holy Week are saved and then burned to create ashes; they are marked on the foreheads of the faithful in the sign of the cross to remind them in whose death it is that they die.

For me, a pastor, the moment of imposing the ashes on the foreheads of dear ones is perhaps the tenderest of the year. One doesn’t automatically associate that kind of pronouncement with tenderness. But in that moment of touch, when skin and skin are separated by only a thin film of ash, when the ancient words are uttered, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return,” there is no more intimate action of giving and receiving. And because it is so true, and because it is a foreshadowing of inevitable things to come, we find ourselves at our most vulnerable. Marking that smudge on the face of a friend becomes a sacrament of the highest degree.

I have been deeply moved by the response of the exceedingly aged, those for whom this is no empty ritual. They have often received the mixture of ash and words with singular grace. Against the backdrop of a death-denying culture, those who find acceptance of death discover real hope and peace.

But I confess that I am most profoundly moved by the presence of the very young. There are those parents who bring their children and are unafraid to accompany them down into the valley of the shadow. And when I behold their trusting faces looking upward, waiting expectantly, receiving the sign of a mystery about which they can have only the slightest inkling, I know why symbols contain such universal power. What we share is something that we comprehend by degree and understand partially, only as we can at the time. What does a child know of brokenness? Give them time and they will discover what the rest of us have come to know. What does a child know of the end of things when so close to the beginning? In time they will know that, too. In that sense the ashes are also teacher and interpreter, carrying a universal message that we come to know as true over time. It provides an interpretive lens to explore the inconceivable.

Is Ash Wednesday the most uncomfortable day of the year? It may be. But it is more than that, too. What I have come to know is that absent its naked honesty we are like people waiting for an untold story to show itself. Ash Wednesday is tough love of the highest kind, a gift that, like tears, reveals what needs to be known most, even as we are inclined to flee it.