Ashes to Stay

Every winter for the last several years, I've had to figure out what to do with ashes.

On a night that's below fifty degrees, I'll build a fire, a crackling dance of light and warmth that fills our home with a primal comfort.  We human beings evolved with fire, and evolved to delight in fire, and the place of the hearth in our lives only changed during my parents generation.  After countless millennia, the scent of carbonizing oak or pine or sycamore has been supplanted by the cool glow and flicker of our screens, the soft time of story and quietness around the open flame replaced with the bingbamboom bustle of one thing after another, scrolling ever downward.

It's a loss, it is, because in our frenetic rushing about we are forgetting things.

Like what ash is, and what ash does.

In our disposable age, we assume that when we have used a thing up, it no longer has worth.  We toss aside teratons of plastic nothings.  We crumple wrappers, we plan for obsolescence, we create a wastestream, a Heraclitan torrent of the unvalued and forgotten.

But ash isn't waste.  Ash isn't worthless.  Nothing God makes is waste, even the greyblack remains of the flame.  It only seems so because we now think in shallow, rushing, wasteful ways, flinging ourselves from moment to moment and missing the whole.  

When I clean out my hearth, I do not discard the ashes.  Ashes are precious to a gardener, rich with calcium and carbon and micronutrients.  Ashes are pitchforked into my compost.  Ashes feed my garlic, plumping the bulbs that have been patiently enduring the winter.  Ashes enrich the soil in which my asparagus grows, and a diet of carbon can keep them yielding for decades.  I'm setting three small beds aside for a new plant this year.  I'm eager to experiment with okra, a plant that is remarkably nutritious, easy to seedsave, beautifully ornamental, and will adapt well to our rapidly warming Midatlantic.  

What does okra love?  Okra loveslovesloves wood ash.

To appreciate ash, one must be unhurried about it.  Over patient years, you learn the richness it adds to the earth, come to know the living things that thrive and grow as they take that ash into themselves.  When you smell the cut garlic on your fingers, snap the first spear of asparagus in the spring, or taste the nutty crunch of fried okra?  

You see the value in what the fire has left behind, and that life has reclaimed and made its own.

Your Best Life Ends in Dust

Sunday night, the wife and I drove downtown and caught us a play.  It's one of the blessings of living inside the Beltway, I suppose, being able to get in some theeee-Ah-Tah now and again.

I like live performance, I do.  It's rawer and more organic than the carefully edited and crafted perfection that is presented to us at the Omnimegaplex 17.  This show was excellent, a performance of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children.  The entire play is a musing on the meaninglessness of war, and the odd interplay between human violence, commerce, and faith.

It was good stuff, staged wonderfully.  That Kathleen Turner was starring as the eponymous Mother Courage was cool, as I was sitting in a front row seat that would have allowed me to lean out and ask her to sign my Betamax copy of Romancing the Stone.  The whole cast was great, proving up to the remarkably varied demands of the show.  Acting, singing, and dancing makes for the classic "triple threat," sure, but what if the show also requires that you know how to play the tuba?  Or the saw?

Impressive.

One of the later songs...and yes, there were songs, of the boozy existentialist beer hall Tom-Waits variety...struck me.  It was a defiant slam against those parts of human understanding that fall apart in the face of life's reality.  Wealth?  Pshaw.  Wisdom?  You still die.  Martial power?  Someone stronger will always come along and stab you in the back.

And faith?  Well, the line was, as I recall, that religion goes on and on about love and the glories of eternity, and doesn't recognize that we really aren't special at all.  "We're just dust and ashes," sang the defiant vocalist, shaking his fist at faith.

To which I thought about my liturgical week, and gently shook my head.

A service of dust and ashes?  Yeah, we do that.  Tonight, in fact.

But as I reflected more, I wondered at the way that Christianity...of the American popular variety...seems to stumble a bit when it comes to the reality of our human condition.  Our mortality, the inescapable reality that we all fade, and wither, and die, that doesn't show up so much in the health and wealth churches, the bright and shiny temples to well-being that sprawl across our stressed and striving land.

We prefer to hide that away, in the same way our culture hides away our old and our dying.

Instead, we hear that we are destined for greatness!  Faith is about abundant life and striving and success and attainment! God wants us to prosper and to thrive and to be amply blessed!

Perhaps.  Some of us will.  Some of the time.  It does happen, and it's good when it does.

And striving and making the joyous most of every one of these precious moments of life is well worth while.  A little bit of positive attitude goes a long way.  Even the grimmest and most world-weary voices from my faith can't steer away from that bit of existential wisdom.

But more clear about God's intent for us is that once we were dust, and to dust we shall return.

All of us.  Even the best life returns to dust.  Even the most extraordinary life ends in ashes.

And if faith is to be real, being able to speak a blessing over that reality is important.

Mercredi Des Cendres

On Wednesday, as the day waned, I found myself preparing to lead a service that I've never actually attended myself.   My home church hadn't made a habit of Ash Wednesday practice when I was a laddie. The congregation I interned in didn't do it, either, not when I was there.  

And for the last eight years, I was part of a church that was moving away from seasons of liturgical awareness.  There were no holy days, because every day was the same, and every worship the same.  By the time I left, the will of the collective had rendered even Easter almost indistinguishable from any other Sunday.

It worked for them, I suppose, and that I sometimes found the absence a bit spiritually dreary was just my own bias.   Those who observe one day as holier than another and those who say all are the same need to just be chill about it, bro, as the Apostle Paul once said.

When I started up in my current ministry, I discovered in that they hadn't observed Ash Wednesday for decades.  But...perhaps in response to my craving for a counterbalance to years of growing sameness...I found that I was sort of up for it.  As were they.

So I went about figuring out how to do it.  I favor brevity in worship, and quiet, and so I ditched the idea of an extended homily and decided simply to do a bit of semi-Socratic question-and-answer about the purpose of the event at the beginning.  The music was a pair of songs from the Taize community, simple, spare, and gentle.   The prayers were right straight out of the Book of Common Worship, gracious and solid and accessible.  The reading?  Just one, right from the lectionary.

Coming up with ashes posed something of a conundrum, as the traditional Palm fronds from the prior year were nowhere to be found.  Where to come up with ashes that bore some sacred meaning?   Just torching a few newspapers seemed too functional.   Fortunately, my recent ritual disposal of a well-loved Bible providentially supplied that need.

That day, I found a metal bowl, and mixed the bible-ash with olive oil.  With light fading, the little sanctuary was prepared.   Candles were lit.  The lights were dimmed.   It wasn't packed, not at all, but my initial assumption of only a dozen souls proved well off.   It was a healthy gathering, at least thirty strong.   It was also widely mixed, drawn from all generations, young and old, children and youth and parents and grandparents.

When it came time for the imposition of ashes, I found...well...it was one of those moments.  It felt different.  Sacred.  Special.   Here I am, touching my forefinger to the forehead of all these people I've come to know.  It is an intimate action, touching another being.  We who live sealed in cars and across the mediating distance of cyberspace can forget this.

And so as they came forward singing, I began marking them, slowly, no hurry, with the sign of the mortality of our Teacher.  To each face, I spoke the same words, drawn from our ancient tradition.   "You are dust, and to dust you shall return."

But with each different face, I found that the same words rang both true and unique.  I spoke it to the soldiers, returned from serving in a war zone.  I spoke it to the widow.  I spoke it to the mother.   I spoke it into the bright eyes of the young.  I spoke it into the smiling upturned face of a child.  All different, yet all sharing that same nature and destiny.

I felt deeply aware, in that moment, of my own mortal life, shared with every pair of eyes that met my own.   I also felt, in that connectedness, the imperative of living into the grace we've been taught.  It felt, for lack of a better word, holy.

It only lasted twenty minutes, and then we all moved out into the peculiar warmth of that February night.   But if a time is set aside as sacred, duration means less than the moment of Presence.