Out of the Ashes

Elementary school introduced me to many things, among them, surprisingly, Lent. What I initially learned came not from my teacher but from the girl who sat in front of me in class. Turning around in her seat one day she told me what her mother was giving up. "Mom's giving up watermelon," my friend told me, "But we can't get watermelon in winter," adding that it would serve her mother right if someone offered her mother a big, juicy slice during Lent. "What's Lent?" I asked her.

I'm still asking that question.

Some years ago some in our faith community began to stretch our Good Friday and Easter Sunday observances celebrations 40 days backwards. At our very first Ash Wednesday service, I asked a friend who heats her house with coal if she would bring in ashes from her stove for our evening meditation. Formerly Catholic, she gave me a puzzled look but brought them in anyway. After putting the lumpy, grey substance in a bowl we set them on the communion table and later passed them around for people to look at. No ash crosses were deposed. I've since come to realize that the churches who know what they are doing on Ash Wednesday use the ashes from last year's palms to mark crosses on foreheads. Having learned that lesson, I began saving the fronds from Palm Sunday and storing them in my office to dry for burning the following year. Soon I discovered that I was alergic to the palms and put them n a storage closet.

Shrove Tuesday, shrove coming from shrive, a 12th century word which means "to confess," was last Tuesday, March 4, and was memorable even though we didn't have a King Cake party. A King Cake involves baking a tiny plastic baby into a cake and then waiting for someone to bite into it. Whoever finds the baby gets to host next year's party. It's a New Orleans thing, of course. Last year Darva and I introduced this tradition to our staff after badgering everyone into leaving their desks and computers to enjoy punch (the making of which pretty nearly destroyed the downstairs kitchen) and cake where we had hidden not one but 12 plastic babies. Had our guests taken the tradition seriously, there would have been quite a lot of cake this year. But no; no one offered to continue the tradition. 

Refreshments or no, Rusty and I continued our tradition of burning the palms on the back porch of the church and stinking up the downstairs hallway. As the palms burned, a friend, working in an upstairs classroom, came down to tell me that we were setting off smoke alarms and that it would be a good idea to move the smoking pot farther away from the building. I carried the can we were using to burn the palms across the grounds, burning my hand and a potholder in the process. The can I set down in the snow where the palms could smoke in peace. Truly a Levitical moment (read Leviticus 6:11 ). When the palms had fully burned and the can had cooled off, Rusty retrieved it, dumped the ashes into a styrofoam cup and set them on my desk.

The next day, Ash Wednesday, began with my friend's sister's internment; she had died very unexpectedly in her sleep the Wednesday before, only 54 years old. My friend asked for my help with the internment, so I prepared a tiny service of committal based on Psalm 139. Her sister's final resting place lay under a frozen blanket of snow that crunched beneath our feet as we gathered to say goodbye. Among the family members was my friend's grandson, age two, who stood quietly beside his mom, holding a red lollipop in mittened hands. The golden urn, shining bright beneath the winter sun, was bedecked with calla lilies, roses, and mums. After leaving the cemetery, I returned to the ashes sitting on my desk in the styrofoam cup.

That we burn last year's palms for Ash Wednesday's service is a rich meditation on life and death. The ashes are combined with olive oil. This year, making up for the year the ashes were too dry and flaked off our foreheads onto our clothing, I made the mixture so dense that they didn't budge when I accidentally dropped the bowl on the floor. Later that evening the mixture of ash and oil was applied to our foreheads in the signature of Jesus, and we all entered into the space of his wilderness, giving ourselves to wind and sand that might "blow the self away.*" Let's hope.

So today we remember that God knows our substance--that we are, as the psalmist puts it, "but dust" (not butt dust as Kara understood our pastor to pray one Sunday). In contrast, God's steadfast love is ever, ever, everlasting.

There is a reason beneath this reflection that I'm still exploring; I'll probably post before it's finished so that it falls between March 5 and April 20 of this year. I began writing a week ago, meaning to post it on the anniversary of the death of our stillborn daughter Laura Anne because it was on Ash Wednesday we learned she had died. Though we had not marked the Lenten season that year for ourselves, we entered a wide wilderness nonetheless and found it to be not only a place of mourning, but also of some unexpected joy because Jesus walked with us. We learned how well he knows the qualities of desert life and that he has the right to speak of loss--which we try very hard to avoid--as blessing. Should we enter with open hearts, we may discover that there are gifts in the sand, under rocks and in caves. Blessed are all who follow Jesus into poverty and wealth, sickness and health, longing and satisfaction.

As we once more enter what can be a spare and sometimes uncomfortable space, I pray for that some beautiful things will grow from the ashes of our crosses. As Isaiah 61:3 puts it, beauty from the ashes, oil of joy for tears, clothes of praise for weakness--plantings of the Lord.