Lent
By Jo Page



Everything is quiet now that the people have gone home. I am sitting in my office, lingering after the Ash Wednesday service. My office opens directly into the chancel and I have left the side spotlights on so that when I go out I won’t be stumbling around in the darkness. Plus, it’s strangely creepy to walk alone through a big, empty church at night. I’ve done it plenty of times but having a light is far more comforting.

The altar guild women have finished up and gone home, too. They have cleaned the communion ware and taken home the linens to be soaked and washed. They have emptied the cut-glass dish of remaining ashes, pouring them back into the jam jar labeled Ashes for Ash Wednesday. They have set the jar back on the shelf in the sacristy so we can use them again next year. My first year as the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church there weren’t any ashes so I created some by burning the accumulated matchsticks I found in the bottom of a coffee can in the sacristy. This worked well enough, though not all of the matchsticks burned completely and I was afraid I might end up thumbing a piece of matchstick onto someone’s sweaty brow, where it would undoubtedly stick.

Lent has come. It is an early Lent, still cold outside, the ground still snow-covered. So it will be an early Easter, which in upstate New York means you may have to wear a winter coat over your new Easter finery. It has been a bitterly cold day and this evening the wind really started up. It howled during the service and made the overhanging eaves creak and groan.

I need to start gathering up my things and getting ready to head for home. I promised my daughter, Linnea, I would make a Caesar salad for dinner and I’d like to eat sometime before ten o’clock. It’s going on eight-thirty already. But right now my body feels heavy and sluggish. The Ash Wednesday services always get to me.

Things were a little askew tonight. Just little things. Like getting the pages of my sermon mixed up, having a different hymn number in the bulletin than the one on the hymn board, finding a drunken fly paddling his way to a happy death in the chalice of sweet, kosher wine. These things happen.

My own image for Ash Wednesday is that of a doorway leading into something dark. Lent arrives and we sing all these songs about blood, sacrifice, and human unworthiness. For some people that means giving something up. I have always thought that kind of a dumb thing to do. But I suppose it can be a convenient time to go on a diet—piety and vanity aren’t really such an odd combination. But why get agitated over the unseemly amount of beer you consume or curse words you use or chocolates you chew when children are starving and soldiers are dying and intelligent people are having to argue against Intelligent Design (‘id’ writ large)?

It seems to me that if Good Friday is about collectively mourning the death of Jesus, Ash Wednesday is about preemptively mourning our own. In Ingmar Bergman’s movie, “The Seventh Seal,” Death plays chess with a medieval knight. The knight is an able player and Death even gives him some tactical advice. Still, there is no way for the knight to win. I think Ash Wednesday is a little bit like that—a reminder that there is no way we are going to come out of life alive. Whether or not you buy into the idea of resurrection, we all must die first.

Each year when I plan the service, I try to find some way to soft-pedal the message and make the service less sad. But there is no getting around it.

Same as always, the hymns tonight were sad. The choir’s haunting anthem was called “Dust and Ashes Choke Our Face.” The readings are always the same for Ash Wednesday, ever reminding us of sin. They are about turning, repenting, acknowledging what little miseries we all are. We repeat the words of Psalm 51: The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

And then there is the imposition.

When I was a girl, all the Catholic kids went to church on Ash Wednesday so that the priest could place an ashy smudge on each of their foreheads. I always thought it was really cool and I wanted to have a smudge on my forehead, too. But we didn’t do ashes in the Lutheran church. Then somehow, as liturgical styles evolved, Lutherans started imposing ashes, too. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I received ashes for the first time.

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” the pastor said to me and marked a small cross with his thumb on my forehead. I wasn’t prepared for how it felt to wear the ash and to know it symbolized my own death. I wasn’t prepared to hear the words that so starkly reminded me of its inevitability. The ashes were not cool, they were cold.

Each year I struggle a little over the ashes. But it is an important tradition for the people of Grace. Nearly everybody in the congregation decides to come forward to receive their cross of ash. They form a line down the center aisle of the nave and one by one come to stand before me.

One by one I carefully place my thumb on the brow of the person in front of me and I remind them that they will die. I say “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I must have said it fifty times tonight. Same as every year, I focused on their brow when I made the cross of ash. I can’t look right into their faces. It’s too hard, too sad. When I distribute the bread during communion, we share what feels to me like a sublimely intimate gaze. But I can’t do that when I mark their foreheads. I would cry if I did. As it is I always get that burning feeling in the back of my throat from trying not to become tearful.

Because I know there is a good chance I will bury a couple of these people in the course of the coming year. They will become a statistic I will record in the Parish Register (“Funeral at Grace; interment in Vale Cemetery”).

I might cry because the people my own age who bow their heads to me are thinking about their deaths. And that makes me think about mine.

Or I might cry because tall men, not yet stooped with age, are bending forward for my touch. Not for my touch, really. But it is through my touch that I am saying something about God. And so they bow their heads to the five-foot-three of me and I say to them “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

And the hardest part is when my kids come forward. Imagine saying to your kids “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return?” I’d rather shoot off a toe than say that to my darlings. But it is what I have to do. I am their pastor. I am marking every face that stands before me with the sign of their mortality, the reminder of their inevitable deaths.

“Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I never want to say this to my children. But I have said it to them for as many Ash Wednesdays as I can remember. I can’t very well say that to everybody else in the congregation and then, when they come before me, say “and you will never be dust, my darlings.”

For that would not be true. It will never be true. Besides, I am their mother much, much more than I am their pastor and I cannot lie to them. Not about important things, anyway. And knowing that life is finite, contained within dates which one day will be chiseled into granite or brass and noted in a Parish Register someplace, is an important reminder for me to give them.

“Don’t forget your lunch money.” And “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

“Please call me when you get there. I mean it.” And “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

***

It’s time to shake off this lethargy and go home. I push myself up from the chair, put on my coat, scarf, gloves. Pick up my pocketbook and tote bag. I glance into the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. There is a dark stain on my brow. It doesn’t look like a cross, but it is one.

Besides all the carefully-reasoned factors that have gone into my decision to leave the parish, the largest one is this: I can’t go on much longer marking foreheads with the sign of death. I can’t go on much longer talking freely about our sin and offering up the broken body and blood of Christ. What used to feel like such a privilege and an honor comes to seem a brutal invasion. Why is it necessary that I, in potent ritual, remind people of sin and suffering and death? It’s clear from the world around us that we are big into suffering and death and painfully aware of the sinful mess we have made. Wars and poverty and cruelty and neglect are the ashes marked all over the earth, not cruciform, but in willy-nilly hieroglyphs of human anguish.

I remember watching the shaman who anointed my dying friend, Miranda, with scented oils. She spoke softly to Miranda and put flowers in her hair and hands and on her chest right over her heart. I never offer those to the people of this congregation, so many of whom I love most dearly. I never offer blooms, but ashes, not scented oils, but the broken body of Christ. And when I baptize babies the liturgical imagery is of death by drowning only after which can they be raised to new life in Christ.

Christian ritual is ringed round with anguish.

I close my office door behind me and walk across the front of the chancel. The heels on my boots are loud on the stone floor, then silent as I walk up the carpeted aisle. I turn around to look at the spot-lit back wall before I leave the sanctuary.

Behind the altar there is a massive wooden cross. Its standing beam goes from the flagstone floor all the way to the apex of the sharply-pitched ceiling—maybe forty feet. The cross beam is placed very high up on the standing beam. Both are very narrow, just a few inches in width, making them disproportionately thin in relation to the cross’ imposing height. The whole effect is a little odd. It almost doesn’t look like what it is. When you are walking down the church aisle, you don’t even really notice it. And when you stand in the chancel you can easily forget that you are standing beneath a towering cross.

That is what it is like in the daytime, anyway. But it is different at night. Because if you stand at the entrance to the church nave when only the side spots are lit and the rest of the sanctuary is in darkness, what you can see is a thin, pitch-black shadow of the cross in bold relief on the far wall. You can’t see the cross itself very well. But you can see its shadow. I have come to like the cross best this way. On those nights I have worked late or have had a meeting, as I’m on my way out of the church, I usually turn on the side spots and turn off the rest of the lights. I stand for a moment in the darkness and look at the spot-lit cross that isn’t there. I am more aware of the presence of its shadow than I am of its floor-to-ceiling wooden beams.

And so this is what I do on my way out tonight after the Ash Wednesday service. I stand for a while, seeing the shadow more clearly than the cross itself. Then I switch off the lights so that all that remains lit is the red Exit sign over the front door. I open it and go out.

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