I’m writing early for my parish blog post this week on Ash Wednesday, grateful for
the opportunity the holiday—such as it is—offers to remember our
creatureliness. When it comes down to
it, Ash Wednesday isn’t a holiday—it doesn’t commemorate anything about our
story of faith or any particular person we remember or any event in the life of
Jesus. Ash Wednesday instead is a gift the Holy Spirit has come to offer the
church through our practice. It has
nothing to do with our virtue or our accomplishment. I’m pretty sure it’s not our own cleverness.
It’s just pure grace.
Wait a minute, Sara.
I just got home from church and I listed my sins in excruciating detail--I sin
against creation, against others, and against myself. What do you mean it’s
pure grace? Shouldn’t grace feel good? Why can’t the church be logical for
once? Isn’t this just another time the church says people are bad?
Well, sure. There is that.
Ash Wednesday doesn’t feel good like a massage or a nice curry or a
walk at sunset. Still, there’s something almost exhilarating about the honesty
that Ash Wednesday invites us into. We
spend a lot of time in this life trying to look like we lead well-curated,
well-organized lives in which our kids always say clever things and our spouses
never get annoyed with us. Social media
has not improved society in this way. In the US, at least, self-reliance is
right up there with cleanliness and godliness. This month I’ve been reading
Amanda Palmer’s book The Art of Asking, (based on her 2013 TED talk of the same name)
which starts with her story about being paralyzed at letting her husband help
her financially. He’s rich and famous (the writer Neil Gaiman), and she’s
mortified about accepting help from him will mean for their relationship and
her identity as an artist. Under it all, she concedes, is her terror
vulnerability—we’re all afraid to be vulnerable. You don’t have to be a famous
artist to be afraid of that (see also: anything Brene Brown has ever written).
Ash Wednesday just pulls the rug out from all of that.
There’s no pretending. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall
return. That’s it. We are
beloved and wondrously gloriously blessed by God, but we are still dust. Ad’ham, made of the earth and to earth
we will return. What a relief! I’m not
perfect and I don’t have to pretend.
Widening the view toward eternity puts life in more rightful
perspective—both in terms of our frailty and in terms of our power. If we are
dust and will return to dust, we can also take some risks once in a while. Longing
to be perfect is a pretty heavy burden to bear. You don’t have to.
The other thing that’s great about Ash Wednesday and its
focus on our earthy dirty selves is that it’s only one day. We take ONE day to look at all of this, and
then we’re done. Boom, on to Lent, on to the actual repentance part. And repentance is great—we can always turn
around, we can always go in a new direction, we can always try again. Lent is about all the ways we’re not stuck in our sin.
Jesus was waited on by angels in the
wilderness. Does God want less for you?
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