Ashes - The Glory and the Shame

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Every spring there comes a day when your friend at work or school will show up with some unsightly black smudges on their forehead. It is too much to be a mascara mishap, and it is unlikely to have been a brush with that morning’s coffee grounds. It is Ash Wednesday, and your friend has just come out of the religious closet.

Two years ago, I participated in my first Ash Wednesday. Ashes have become a new trend lately in some Christian circles, so I spent a couple weeks in February 2005 learning as much as I could about the history of Ash Wednesday and Lent. What I learned was exciting and inviting.

I knew it was a part of the Church calendar that marked the beginning of Lent, which is the 40 days that lead up to Easter. But I didn’t know that the ashes are the old palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday, or that they are meant to remind us of our mortality, that we will one day become ashes ourselves. I learned that Lent is an opportunity to become still before God, to stop our constant self-gratification, to recognize our sin, and to reflect upon our need for a Savior.

As a burnt-out evangelical, the idea of a quieter life with deeper reflection and contrition is appealing. So I went to the Ash Wednesday service at my university’s ecumenical center. While I sat there with about 100 other staff and students and listened to the liturgy, my heart was ready to break under its own need for repentance.

However, I felt like I was one of the few people in that building that were treating this service as an intimate experience. Everywhere I looked, I saw disengaged faces and whispered comments between friends. The Catholic priest and the Lutheran pastor took turns sharing Scripture and leading songs in Latin and English. When it came time for us to receive the ashes from the priest, he asked, “Will you turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel?” without looking at me. Even when I didn’t answer him for a moment, he didn’t look in my eyes. I was wondering how long it would take him to notice if I didn’t say anything. I got nervous in my own silence with the long line behind me so I quietly said, “By God’s grace, I will.” Immediately, his thumb rubbed the thick ashes across for my forehead in the shape of a cross, and I felt clumps of black falling on my eyebrows and cheeks. I made my way back to my seat with my eyes down. I could feel the warm itchiness of the ashes cooling on my skin.

As my friend and I left the somber service and entered the bright light of the early afternoon, I asked her, “Have you figured out what the ashes mean yet?”

“I’m not quite sure.” she said.

We both looked up at each other’s blackened foreheads and started laughing a little since we were two of the very few students who had ashes on that day. We felt nervous doing something that we didn’t quite understand, but participating in the service was our way of submitting to a wisdom we did not yet have.

As we crossed the front lawn of the campus, we were confronted by startled glances. Not ten minutes after church, a friend of ours wanted to know what the ashes meant. I told her what we had heard in the service, and I watched her face cloud with skepticism. When my other Christian friends saw my dusky, black smudges, they seemed shocked and slightly alienated. Shocked because they didn’t understand why I had done it, and alienated because it made me different from them.

It makes sense that they were surprised, though. You think you know a person and then one day they turn up with ashes smudged on their forehead. It is unsettling because it is out-of-the-ordinary and difficult to ignore.

I was struck by how wonderfully odd it felt to be displaying my spirituality in a physical way—to turn myself inside-out. And how the ashes are imposed to remind us of our mortality and our sin, and Lent is about less of ourselves and more of Him; yet so many people wore their ashes proudly like, “I’m Catholic…So?” and still did all the loud, exuberant, stressed-out crap that everybody always does. How does that embody the somber attitude of Ash Wednesday?

I am not saying that Catholics are terrible people or that they don’t understand Ash Wednesday. Honestly, they have been practicing it for much longer than I have, and I am sure there are many who are sincere in their participation. I’m just saying that the majority of the students at my secular university didn’t seem to let the ashes effect their daily lives at all. For a lot of people, Ash Wednesday is about aligning themselves with a religion or a denomination instead of aligning their hearts with God.

But one good thing I can say, for myself, is God gave me a quiet, thirsty heart. All day long, I was not content to be my normal, sociable self. I longed to shy away from people and to be embraced by the gentleness of Christ. Among the laughter and studying in the student union, I found a secluded chair to sit in and read the Scriptures recommended during the service. As I meditated on 2 Corinthians 5 about our bodies groaning for the house of the Lord, and Psalms 103’s reminder that we are like the grasses that wither in the seasons, I had a sneaking suspicion Jesus is the only person able to deal with all of my unsatisfied issues and conflicted emotions. As I read the call in Matthew 6 to seek God earnestly in our private lives and to trust Him for all our needs, and in Isaiah 58 to fast and to feed the hungry in order to grow closer to God, my dried-out soul became a sponge to the Living Water.

I am learning that rituals do not have to be negative things. They are meant to help us live out a spiritual concept in a physical world. They are a vessel in which our faith can grow. A repeated spiritual exercise is intended to be the Church’s way of preserving Truth within herself, and protecting herself from fuzzy thinking and lukewarm living. They will be useless, however, if our hearts and minds are not involved in the process.

I tend to forget my sin and my need for repentance. Ash Wednesday gives me the opportunity to reflect upon that need. Maybe I don’t know everything at 22 years of age, and the centuries before me have wise traditions I need to put on; and in the process of seeking that wisdom, I am blessed.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word. And, to make a right beginning of repentance, and as a mark of our mortal nature, let us now kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer. -1979 Common Book of Prayer, p. 264