Ash Wednesday 2022
Something that I’ve heard time and time again in conversations with members of this community is that we’ve lost our sense of time. The traditions and activities that once helped us to mark time have been dislodged or altered or suspended. Life’s transitional moments seem to happen off stage, even when they’re on a screen. It is difficult to relocate memories of the recent past without any sense of the trail of time itself, and we are just starting to uncover and reclaim the markers. This day is one of those blazes on the trail for me. My first Ash Wednesday as a priest was February 26th, 2020. 14 days later, everything changed. My second Ash Wednesday as a priest, I did not impose ashes on anyone’s forehead. I preached to a camera and an empty church, and that sermon was only possible by the gift of the Spirit and the demands of time, because I felt entirely drained. How does one preach hope into the ashes of our mortality when our mortality is all around us, every day? I spoke about masks instead, and shared a poem a friend had written about stitching tiny masks for her young children in preparation for the day they would return to the classroom. Another year later, they still haven’t gone back. It was a difficult and depressing day, even for an Ash Wednesday.
And now, another year, the third Ash Wednesday of my priesthood and the beginning of my first Lent with you. I will put ashes on your foreheads and bread into your hands, and we will remember together that we are mortal, that we will all someday die. We will hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” and go out into the world to be that reminder for all who see the cross we bear and the mask we wear. Perhaps this year, this Lent, we have an opportunity to reenter sacred time, to synchronize our rhythms with the rhythms of the Divine. So much of our life these past two years has been disembodied. Ash Wednesday is a day to remember that we are bodies, and to return to ourselves.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. We could also say, remember you are soil, and to soil you shall return. Remember that you are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and to the elements you shall return. Remember the stuff you are made of, remember where you come from. You shall return. The world might accuse this particular day of being morbid, of being death-obsessed, of being strange and performative. But what we’re doing here today is a sacred act of honesty, a truth-telling. We are admitting the limits of what we are in a way that frees us. When we acknowledge that we are not God, that we are finite and vulnerable and incarnate, we become free to be truly ourselves. We become free to step off the pedestals and away from the idols and see ourselves as God sees us. One of the stories of our creation in Genesis depicts God as artisan, sculpting the first humans from the clay of the Earth. The same firmness and tenderness of a potter is attributed to our creator, every detail and every imperfection lovingly held and carefully molded. When the construction of our forebears is complete, the act of creation is finished by the Creator breathing life into them. This breath is the life-giving spirit that moved over the waters at the beginning of the world, the same breath that breathes each of us into being and sustains us even now. We could say, then, remember that you are breath, and to breath you shall return. In observing a holy Lent, you are invited to remember and return. The remembering is our truth, and in the returning is our hope, our home, our God. Remember, and return.
Mother A Writes 