THE THREAD | The absence of ash on Ash Wednesday
It’s early morning on Ash Wednesday.
As I write this to you, the sun has not yet risen and a thick layer of snow covers everything I can see beyond my window. I am not quite sure how to mark this particular morning. For so many years, I have risen early every Ash Wednesday to attend a church service, ushering in Lent when the priest marks my forehead with ash and whispers, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This particular moment in the liturgical year always marks another reminder of where I come from and where I am going: From dust, and back to it.
There is no service today. I feel a mixture of sadness and, to be honest, resignation. Because of the pandemic I’ve not set foot in church for nearly a year. My home parish has found many ways to adapt with online church and virtual morning prayer. But when the most essential ritual of a faith tradition involves feeding one another with bread and wine, there is no remote substitution. Yes, I know there are churches that remain open, and if simply attending a church—any church—was the most important thing to me, I would be sitting in a pew right now instead of writing to you.
My sadness today is over the loss (in the midst of so much loss) of one more small thing, even if that thing is simply a smudged forehead as a reminder of my mortality. Perhaps it is tempting to suggest that such awareness can simply take place in my heart. Just tell yourself that you're only human and then get on with your day, bud! But heart is a beating muscle located in a body that thrums throughout the day in relation to what the body encounters. And when you encounter someone else’s thumb pressing greasy black ash into your brow while the movements of that person’s mouth and teeth and tongue are telling you that you are dust, there is a relational recognition—an I-Thou — taking place in that moment which sends a certain kind of reverberation that no mere thought that replicate. You are a body, like me, formed of dust, like this.
As for my feeling of resignation, it is due to a sort of numbness I’ve experienced over the past year as I long for something that has gone missing, and as I loathe the cheap and artificial ways we have tried to replace or replicate the embodied and the tactile and the real. I long for something that has gone missing; I am offered an inauthentic replacement; I feel disappointed; and I stupidly allow my heart to grow one layer harder in order to deal with the disappointment. Faced with such loss, I allow myself to care less. I have caught myself falling into this trap on more than one occasion this year, and I imagine I could spend the entire forty days of Lent repenting of this one repetitive act of carelessness.
Yet I cannot help but be reminded of the words of Martin Prechtel: “If we do not grieve what we miss, we are not praising what we love.”
The thing that I am grieving-missing-praising-loving this morning is very particular, a small moment I encounter for a mere hour once a year. I am missing the drive to the cathedral in the quiet dark of a winter morning. I am missing the way the old oak pew arranges my body into a certain posture. I am missing the tall black rafters casting darkness over the room before dawn. I am missing the nave’s floorboards, how they come together center aisle at a sharp angle forming an arrow pointing toward the altar, and how the walk down the aisle is as if being pulled toward. I am missing the slow, incremental way the winter sunrise begins to illuminate the room in a soft purple glow through the stained glass window above the altar depicting Christ’s resurrection. It is while bathed in the glow of Christ’s dawning body that I receive through the touch and voice of another human being the reminder that I am dust—and beloved dust at that.
The thing I am grieving-missing-praising-loving on this particular morning — it is just one small thing. Perhaps you would choose something else for yourself this morning, some other small thing of your own that has gone missing. (And what is it?)
For me, on this quiet winter morning, my one small thing cannot be replaced. It cannot be replicated.
But it can be named.
And it can be remembered in my body.
And my heart can thrum onward in the hope of its return.
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What I'm reading: David Whyte's Crossing the Unknown Sea
What I'm watching: The Queen's Gambit
What I'm listening to: Natalie Hemby's Puxico, Quiet Takes' "San Fidel"
What I'm podcasting: M. Night Shyamalan discussing self-doubt and resilience
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Take care and stay warm,
Andrew
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