Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian year when we begin the 40 days of Lent, a liturgical season of penitence leading up to the high holy day of Easter.
Many people of faith (although perhaps not many American Baptists) may mark the day by going to a worship service and accepting the mark of ashes on their forehead. The smudged cross is a reminder of our human condition: that we are made of dust, and it is to dust that we will return.
Five years ago, Ash Wednesday happened to coincide with my first day returning to classes after the memorial service for my 17-year-old son. Words cannot express the visceral impact I felt upon finding myself caught in a wave of students coming from morning Mass, all with their foreheads marked by the ashen sign of a cross.
Ashes to ashes… when my son’s were newly enshrined in an urn on my mantel.
This year, a colleague from California spoke of bearing witness to a different kind of ritual of ashes as clergy accompanied those returning to the homes destroyed by wildfires.
Dust to dust… when everything they owned was reduced to ashes.
How might we choose to enter this intentional season of Lenten preparation? Will we attend to our own mortality—and the mortality of those around us? Do we dare to sit in these ashes and let our faith be formed by grief, lament, loss, confession, or remorse?
What might we learn there? How might it deepen and form our faith as a Resurrection people?
Sit with me
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian year when we begin the 40 days of Lent, a liturgical season of penitence leading up to the high holy day of Easter.
Many people of faith (although perhaps not many American Baptists) may mark the day by going to a worship service and accepting the mark of ashes on their forehead. The smudged cross is a reminder of our human condition: that we are made of dust, and it is to dust that we will return.
Five years ago, Ash Wednesday happened to coincide with my first day returning to classes after the memorial service for my 17-year-old son. Words cannot express the visceral impact I felt upon finding myself caught in a wave of students coming from morning Mass, all with their foreheads marked by the ashen sign of a cross.
Ashes to ashes… when my son’s were newly enshrined in an urn on my mantel.
This year, a colleague from California spoke of bearing witness to a different kind of ritual of ashes as clergy accompanied those returning to the homes destroyed by wildfires.
Dust to dust… when everything they owned was reduced to ashes.
How might we choose to enter this intentional season of Lenten preparation? Will we attend to our own mortality—and the mortality of those around us? Do we dare to sit in these ashes and let our faith be formed by grief, lament, loss, confession, or remorse?
What might we learn there? How might it deepen and form our faith as a Resurrection people?
Sit with me