Tag / Ash Wednesday

by Michael

Ashes to Ashes

I’m reblogging this from 2016 to mark this meaningful moment in the liturgical year. It’s written post the event and I’m repurposing it to look ahead to this Wednesday.

On Wednesday, all day long, me and a group of chaplains were going about the hospital saying a version of the same thing. “You were created from ashes and one day you will return to ashes. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ. Repent and believe the good news that God loves you and longs for you to be whole.”

I’d ask for the person’s name, look her or him in the eye, and pronounce these words so that each word was clear, pronounced. And for each of us, me and the individual, we heard the echo of our limitation in life. We heard that we could respond to the good news and that we were going to die.

I have acknowledged two Ash Wednesdays in a hospital, and it’s a deeply sobering experience. Level 1 Trauma Center. Downtown Chicago. All kinds of people. Many different reasons for their hospitalizations when they’re patients. Just as many different stories when they’re on the staff. And my role—with other spiritual caregivers—is to remind them of their wonderful and simple createdness while also reminding them of their eventual end.

I have thought, on more than one occasion, about dying. Not all the details of my death. But the broad vague fact of it. You can’t flee from it when you see death a lot. When you’re alongside a doctor who checks for a pulse and who tells a wife that her husband of five decades is taking his final breaths. Or when you walk with people on the cusp of it. Or when you listen to last breaths being taken and released. Or when you hold all those tears of loved ones whose burdens are unutterable.

The contemplation of death is a prerequisite for the minister. The articulation of some hope in the midst of it is as well. Part of our articulation is in the hope hinted at during Ash Wednesday. We hold both life and death in our mouths. And we pronounce that both are true, that both are to be accepted as (now or eventual) gifts.

It’s not a conversation starter, this ashes to ashes business. It’s not something you want to open the day with. And yet it happens to hundreds of people. It’s the one day I’ll see people as Christians. Non-Christians don’t get “ashed”. Catholics almost certainly do, and many Protestants will as well. Dark crosses become an acceptable part of the otherwise identical uniform. Some wear that chalky cross and some don’t. I tell myself that these are the people who are more closely aware of their ends. They know their limits. They realize that death is coming.

And the coming of death for the Christian, ashed or not, is a confusing experience. We don’t welcome it because we love life. Yet we don’t see it as something worth running from when it comes since “to die is gain.” And of course as I’ll say in upcoming posts, the experience of grieving after loss is another long matter.

by Michael

Season of Lent

The word Lent comes from a word related to the lengthening of days in the movement from winter to spring.  The season begins with Ash Wednesday and lasts for forty days, excluding Sundays.  While Lent is thought of as a time for Christians to give up something or to sacrifice something, it is more than that.  Lent is a time for us to stretch our lives before God as we stretch from one season to another.  We move toward Easter, the time where we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Lent comes before that monumental time in the Church’s life.  It is a marker in the liturgical year where we welcome not the highlights but the sufferings of the world and of its people.  Lent is another opportunity for us to remember that the follower of Jesus is a person walking the path of personal suffering and suffering endured for the sake of others.

Lent is a time of reflection and consideration.  This is a reflective and penitential season, when Christians are called to examine ourselves as we remember the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf and on behalf of the world God created.  It is a time to consider how we are following the Suffering Servant who is Jesus or, perhaps, how we aren’t.  We mourn our lack of faithfulness.  We reflect upon it.  And we, by God’s grace, change.

When I was a boy at St. John De La Salle, I got convinced that Lent was about giving up something.  Meat.  Chocolate.  Commercials.  In some ways the season is about giving something up, but that something is harder than the temporary offering of something like cartoons or food or phone calls.  Lent is a time of repentance.  Like a good gardener clipping weeds or yanking decayed roots, during this season, we pull up sinful roots that have wrapped our feet.  The Spirit enables us to cut away at our old selves and things which bind us so that we can turn toward God who gives us new life.

Finally, Lent is a time of both daily and delayed celebration.  The Gospel of Jesus Christ comes to say that we are unconditionally accepted and loved by a God who is more powerful than sin and suffering and death.  As much as Lent is a time of suffering or repentance, it is also a time where we say over and over what God already knows—that people suffer daily and outside the bounds of a particular season.  People suffer in Japan.  People suffer in Haiti.  People suffer in the Congo.  We could write a long list. 

The church says to itself and to the world around it that God is concerned about the suffering of people, that God has done something about that suffering.  We celebrate God’s acts.  We do so while we continue to trust that God who has acted will continue to act.  We celebrate now for all God in Christ, and through the Church, has done.  And we celebrate for what God will do as we look toward the next big, holy season.