“To pray is to pass from the state where grace is present in our hearts secretly and unconsciously, to the point of full inner perception and conscious awareness when we experience and feel the activity of the Spirit directly.”
Kallistos Ware (1934 - 2022)
Ash Wednesday, 2025
I think the Ash Wednesday service is one of the year’s most moving for me – there’s nothing like a quiet room full of people of all ages with ashes on our heads. The realization that soon, none of us will be here. For me, it makes the present moment electric, charged somehow with a sense of tenderness and reverence, and an unspoken awareness that our brief lives are precious, and it is a privilege to care for each other while we can. For me, there’s nothing quite like Ash Wednesday. There’s a sense of presence in it for me, the Presence of God, Holiness, the Divine.
For forty years now on Ash Wednesday, 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, I sometimes wonder 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? What I know is that with each thumb-imprinted cross on the forehead, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” something is awakened in me, and I’m sure in them.
I wonder if with each smudge of ashes I might as well use that familiar blessing I’ve often used, “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.”
I have also blessed, baptized, and anointed babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care, just before they died. I’ve done the same for 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 a 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.
The poet Wallace Stevens once said, “Death is the mother of beauty.” 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 daily worries, distractions, and busyness, so that we don’t have time to notice the most powerful thing within us. But then we see the ashes, we hear the word, “remember….” Then the most important truth, the Presence, our soul, it all wells up and causes us to hold each other, and if we speak, it’s only to say only what is necessary: “I love you,” “Thank you,” “You mean everything to me.” Things we could choose to say to each other at any time.
Maybe Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are intended to be the revealers 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, 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 and wonder for this one precious life we have together.
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