Post 202--Ash Wednesday 2018

Better late than never, as the trite saying has it.  It's 1:40 am, Friday right now. Two days after Ash Wednesday. Another way of saying, "Late!"  I so confess, but the truth and significance of Ash Wednesday still holds,.  It is too important for my tardiness to undo it.  It is too objective for my subjectivity to undo it. 

The rest of this post constitutes a meditation on Ash Wednesday written by Rev. Gary Patterson of the St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church at Burrard and Nelson in downtown Vancouver, just a few blocks from where I am writing. In Patterson's style, I invite you to sit back, relax and ponder what he offers you. 

However, Patterson being a liberal, there are some elements in his Ash meditation that are missing. Some of that will be expressed in the next post. I had hoped that would be tomorrow, but I will be away. To leave the matter till my return a few days from now, puts it too far from the actual day, even further than Patterson's. So, I will do that follow-up post a few hours from now. Not sure whether the computer will record it as the 16th or 17th. 

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THINKING ABOUT WHAT MATTERS

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and there will be a special worship service here at St. Andrew’s-Wesley, at 7 pm tonight, in the Chapel. It’s not a “popular” or well-attended service in the United Church. But I remember four years ago, during my time as Moderator, when I was in Bogota, Colombia on Ash Wednesday and decided to go to a morning service at a nearby Catholic church.

Imagine my surprise to discover the church was full to overflowing, and when the brief service ended there were long line-ups, hundreds of us waiting to receive the mark of ashes on our foreheads. During the rest of the day, as I wandered about the city, it seemed that every other person was similarly marked. It was a strange sight… and sobering, knowing that everyone bearing the ash symbol had heard the priest softly say, “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.”

Lent is a pondering time, an opportunity to think about some of those questions about life’s meaning that too often get neglected in the day to day busy-ness. Questions like… “Who am I? What’s truly important to me? What am I doing with my life? When I look at myself in the mirror, what do I see? What am I doing with my dreams, with my regrets?” And there’s nothing like being reminded of your mortality to give some oomph to those questions.

In our culture, we are encouraged to avoid thinking about death, and we go merrily along, pretending we have all the time in the world. It’s not true, and in our hearts, we know that to be so… it’s why that Ash Wednesday ritual can be such a helpful reminder.

Ash Wednesday goes further than simply being a stark reminder of our limited time. The phrase, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” is traditionally followed by some kind of statement that invites, no, calls us to “Repent!”… which is to say, “Turn your life around. Change the way you are living. Let go of a way of being that sucks the life out of you.” Thus, Lent invites us both to think seriously about our days, asking, a la Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” AND THEN … to start making changes.

This Lent season many of us will be reading Eric Elnes’ book, Gifts of the Dark Wood, in which he suggests that struggles and hard times can become moments of discovery. Finding ourselves uncertain, or facing emptiness and loss, these experiences can, with grace, become a gift, … a bit like having ashes on your forehead and being reminded that you will soon return to the dust from which you came.

I was recently reading a book of essays by Ursula Le Guin, who, when she was 80, was asked what she did with her “spare time.” Her response is something to ponder in the season of Lent:

"To a working person… spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such … But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare time? … When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it? And what’s the difference really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

… The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case, I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living … I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up with kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, … None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it… I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare."

(from No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, Ursula Le Guin, 2017)

Post 93—Ash Wednesday

I wonder: Did you observe Ash Wednesday this month?  It fell on Wednesday, February 10. As the name makes obvious, it always is celebrated on Wednesday.  But perhaps, before asking whether you observed it this past week, a prior question is whether you even know what it is. A second question is, even if you know what it is, whether you gave it any thought at all. The answer to the last question probably depends on which church you attend and whether your church pays attention to it. Some churches or denominations do; others ignore it. I attend two different churches/denominations, and both observed it by holding special services on the evening of February 10.

So what is Ash Wednesday? Wikipedia gives the following bare, curt definition: “the first day of Lent in the Western Christian Church, marked by services of penitence.”  As if the writer regrets this curt version, she/he then provides a few more details: “a day of fasting, is the first day of Lent in Western Christianity. It (normally) occurs 46 days…before Easter and can fall as early as February 4th or as late as 10 March. Ash Wednesday is observed by many Western Christians, including Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists,Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics.”  More recently denominations like the Christian Reformed Church and some Baptist groups have also begun to observe it.  The more recent arrivals have dropped the fasting part of it.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness or desert, during which time he faced satanic temptations. The 40 days of Lent, which Ash Wednesday is day 1, mirrors this period of fasting. The name itself comes from the ashes made from palm branches that were used on the previous year’s Palm Sunday. These ashes were/are placed in the form of a cross on the foreheads of the participants by a clergy person, accompanied with formulae like “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19) or  “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mark 1:15). The first and more original of the two sayings are the words spoken to Adam and Eve after their fall into sin and remind worshippers of their sinfulness and mortality along with their need to repent. 

Ash Wednesday in some countries is enriched by some additional traditions. For example, I understand that on that day the Pope traditionally participates in a penitential procession between two churches, where ashes are sprinkled on his head—not smudged on his forehead--, while the Pope also places ashes on the heads of other worshippers. The Catholic Church and, more recently, some Protestant churches as well, participate in the “Ashes to Go” programme, during which clergy go to public places like downtowns, sidewalks, train stations, malls to place ashes on passersby, sometimes even on drivers waiting at stoplights! Another innovation is for small cards to be distributed among the congregation on which people are invited to write a sin they need to confess. These cards are then brought to an altar or table where they are burned. 

The association of ashes with grief, sorrow or repentance has ancient Biblical and cultural roots, even among Israel’s Pagan neighbours as in Nineveh. When Tamar was raped by her half-brother, she sprinkled ashes on her head…and went away crying (2 Samuel 13:19). Job said in Job 42:3-6, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” The prophet Jeremiah called for repentance, “O daughter of my people, gird on sackcloth, roll in the ashes” (Jeremiah 6:26). Daniel pleaded to God “in earnest prayer with fasting, sackcloth and ashes” (Daniel 9:3). In the New Testament, Jesus spoke of the practice: “If the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matthew 3:47; Luke 10:13). There is also reference to it in Hebrews 9:13. 

So my wife and I participated in the ceremony at First Baptist Church in downtown Vancouver. But it was not merely a ceremony; it was a living experience what with the readings, prayers and hymns that goaded us towards a renewed sense of our sinfulness, mortality and need to repent. Though these are daily elements in the heart of a born-again Christian—or should be—a ceremony like this refreshes that awareness and stimulates one’s resolve to revive it. I am happy that I participated in this first step into Lent. The beauty of it all is that, paradoxically, after one goes through what sounds like a macabre exercise, one comes away from it with renewed joy and peace in his heart.

If you have not been in the habit, I strongly recommend attending Ash Wednesday 2017.  Especially for the born-again, for those who are alive in Christ, it is a blessed way of starting your Lenten journey towards the Resurrection of our Lord.