Ash Wednesday reflections

"You are ashes; and to ashes you shall return."

These words struck me yesterday and have been sitting with me for a while now. I think the relationship often gets missed and instead we see it as an affirmation of our fragility, which it is, and therefore God's security, which it also is. We feel in the receiving of ashes a particular death as the smooth ashes from last year's strange celebration of Jesus' impending death--Palm Sunday--scrape onto our foreheads in the shape of a cross. But what of the relationship between the two phrases? We know they are about are death. But I think that they are really about our life. We are ashes right now, in this moment. Yet we shall return to ashes? This is truly a mystery, but look at it. If we shall return to ashes, then we are something more than ashes. There is something animating these ashes that we are. Though we are dust, this dust is full of life and potential to be made a tool of the living God, the Easter God. Our God is a God of life, not of death and that is something that we must begin to know. Our embrace of death is a means to life and nothing more or less than that. Jesus shows us that in order to find the life that God brings, in order to be given life by God and not by our mothers and fathers or faith communities or neighborhoods, we must die. We must suffer. we must find that all this around us, all that we see and think that we know to be true is but dust. Jesus Christ is True, is more than dust. but in the symbol of dust upon our foreheads, we see and feel and know that Jesus is behind the dust, holding things up and making them worthwhile. If we do not die, we can still suffer the illusion that our lives are not contingent upon God. If we will not be crucified, we will not be resurrected. The living do not need resurrection--the dead do. So I thank God for the whisper of ashes still on my forehead. It is a grace that reminds me of my life.

But dying does not happen the way we want it to. We live in a world fascinated with death. I read an article in the New York Times today about how male models are skinnier and skinnier these days to the point that it is becoming a concern for those in the industry because the men are showing equally disconcerting signs of eating disorders, etc. that the female models have long been criticized for. What is chic? bulimia is chic. cocaine-induced thinness is chic. sunken cheeks, hollow eyes. even the girls in ads these days. Several ads that I've seen depict what appears to be helpless, strung-out domestic violence victims crammed into a bathroom or onto a couch for some sort of quickie before going back out to take a hit off someone's crack pipe. Yippee!!!! Fashion Rules!!! I need some new jeans because my old ones have room for muscles, tendons, ligaments, and epidermis. What was I thinking? I knew I should have just gone with bones this morning. Point is that skeletons, death, despair--these are "in." Life is rarely celebrated. We numb our pain with drugs, be it weed, alcohol, heroine, television, crack, caffeine or any other of the host of entertaining options available. We watch UFC like sick Romans lining up at the Coliseum to watch early Christian martyrs be devoured by lions, tigers, or other human beings. We entertain ourselves into numbness, into nothing, into dust. At the very best we idealize environmentalism, social justice, community and bike rides at the cost of digging into life anywhere. There is, in fact, an image of life that many purport to be chasing but here's the problem: it only involves life. We are still stuck trying to make castles out of the dust that we know, mocking the reality behind reality by either numbing ourselves until dust is all we believe there is or spinning long tales about the magnificent nature of our dust castles and how they are pointing to the real truth of life. For us Christians (okay, monotheists), we believe it points to God (which it doesn't) and for the others, there is a belief in a sort of mystical goodness that somehow makes things worthwhile.

If I'm honest, this is who I am. Though I am aware of my dustiness, I seek to justify it with all that I am. I seek to make it okay for me to be dust and nothing else. And so, for a long time, I have embraced death with reckless abandon because after all, that is who we are, right? I am caught in the tension of which St. Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans. "What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?" Of course the answer is a resounding "No!" In fact, to do so would be to mock the Life to which we are beholden for even the breaths that we take in at this moment. Jesus came that we might be saved from the death of an ash-world, not so that we might enter into it irretrievably. Yet I still find myself sinning so that I might know grace, convinced that grace is the removal of guilt--but how can I have guilt unless I sin? No. grace is the fact that I am here, that I exist at all is a profound gift, a grace for which I cannot utter enough thanks. To sin is to move farther from that grace, not to embrace it more. I must move closer to that grace, by accepting the life in each of my parts, in the lonely and frustrated areas of my heart and life. in the impatient, lusty, ugly nasty places of my inside house, I must invite grace in. Lent prepares me for that. By fasting, by giving something up, I clear out a little space to accept the grace of the Father for me. By simplifying my life, cutting down on the complexity of my meals, I remember that even rice is a gift. even salt, even a glass of water are grace to me--and that grace so fills my life and my existence that I cannot wait for Palm Sunday when I can shout, "Hosanna! Christ has come to Jerusalem! And he is going to die so that I might have a life so full that even the voice that cries out is a gift to me!!! Hooray! Hosanna!" Nothing, not even my self is my own. What a wonderful thought.

Lent is a reminder that, in fact, even my own heart is farther from me than I once thought and that knowledge brings life as the waves lap the shore and wash away the dust castles of this world. in this moment, this castle-less moment, God saves us. As we die to our dusty selves, to dusty sin, to the dusty world, God looks at the empty landscape that is exhausted from human efforts to build and build, to create and make the trappings of holiness, and God begins, piece by piece, to build true castles--out of rocks, not out of sand. Out of mortar and brick and wood and straw. Then God breathes life into those castles which, though different from sand, are nevertheless variable arrangements of dust, and the castles begin to glorify the breather of life in a thousand sundry ways. shouting Hosanna! Hosanna! Hallelujah to the God who showed us the way, who died and was raised again to life. Praise Jesus!

Lord, kill me, I pray. I yearn for your life.

"If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?" (Kathleen Norris)