Ash Wednesday

For almost forty years now, I have put ashes on the foreheads of elderly people, middle-aged people, young adults, youth, and even infants in their mothers’ arms, saying to each one, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” 

When I put the ashes on babies, what are their mothers and fathers seeing and feeling?  When I mark the foreheads of the elderly, what are their spouses, children, and grandchildren experiencing?  I do not know.  But with each thumb-imprinted cross on the forehead, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I do know that something is awakening in me, and I’m sure in them.

At times, I’ve wondered if part of what I am saying, with each smudge of ashes, is something like a blessing that became popular years ago: “Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who are traveling the journey with us.  So, be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.”  But nowadays, I would make haste to add, “And forgive yourself.  You are worried about something God forgave long ago and now has no recollection of it at all.  So, receive that forgiveness.  Because what we do not know ourselves, we cannot offer to others.”

I have also blessed, baptized, and anointed babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, just before they died.  I’ve anointed elderly people in the hospital, as well as young adults and middle-aged folks, after an illness or accident, just before life supports were removed.  And all the while, the parents of the babies and loved ones of the elderly and the young, all stood around the one being anointed, holding each other, with a love so intense that it could only be expressed in tears and one final embrace.  It produces an ache, a longing, and a resolve to use every last second and every fiber of one’s being to express what is bursting from one’s heart.

“Death is the mother of beauty,” a famous poet once said^[1].  But I wonder if death is really just the revealer of beauty. The revealer of a beauty and love that have been with us all along, just hidden beneath our worries and distractions, like a treasure buried under our busyness, and yes, beneath our grudges, so that we simply are not aware of the most powerful One within us. 

But then we see the ashes, we hear the word, “Remember…,” and maybe the most important truth, the Presence, our soul, wells up and causes us to hold each other, and if we speak, it is to say only what is necessary: “I love you,” “Thank you,” “You mean everything to me.”

Maybe Ash Wednesday is intended to be the revealer of this hidden but ever-present Beauty and Love that is always within each of us, just hidden or covered up much of the time.  Maybe the smudge of ashes reveals the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Presence that can suddenly produce that ache, that longing, and that resolve to devote ourselves to the One Thing that matters most: to express our gratitude for this world, our love for the people who are traveling the journey with us, and our awe for this one precious and miraculous life we have together.

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^[1] Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”