The meditation offered at this week’s Ash Wednesday service:
In the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, the main character, John, recalls a story from his childhood in a small Kansas town in the late 19th century. He remembers going with his father to join with the rest of the community in helping tear down a church that had been struck by lighting and burned. The whole town had come to help out, as they did in those days, and even though it rained, they continued on that work of pulling down walls, digging through wreckage to see could be saved. While the adults worked in the rain, the children, including John, huddled under a wagon to stay dry.
Much later in his life, John tells the story to his own son. He says:
“The ashes turned liquid in the rain and the men who were working in the ruins got entirely black and filthy, till you would hardly know one from another. My father brought me some biscuit that had soot on it from his hands. “Never mind,” he said, “there’s nothing cleaner than ash.” But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might have tasted like the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it’s mostly forgotten now.
“…. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me that biscuit from his scorched hand, with the old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing “The Old Rugged Cross” while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. … It was so joyful and sad. I mention it again because it seems to me much of my life was comprehended in that moment. Grief itself has often returned me to that morning, when I took communion from my father’s hand. I remember it as communion, and I believe that’s what it was” (Robinson, Gilead.)
Tonight, we gather amidst ashes, too, and though the communion table is strangely empty, we are here for a different kind of communion – the communion of community, in which we stand together and turn our faces toward the long and sometimes difficult season of Lent. We stand in community together, to begin this walk – a walk that begins with the dusty residue of ash, that always, always, affects the taste of things.
The ashes we use to mark ourselves tonight come from the burned and dried up palms we waved nearly a year ago, as we watched Jesus enter Jerusalem and joined the crowds in shouting hosanna. All year, these palms have been with us, tucked away down the hall, slowly growing more dried out and crinkly with age. But still – two days ago – they looked like palms, the green of the leaves faded, but still green, still resembling life, but then, in an instant, with a quick fiery flame and a pummel of smoke, they turned to smoldering ash, dull and flaky gray – unmistakably lifeless.
This first day of Lent, with its ashy beginning, reminds us of that lifelessness – that in an instant life can be gone out of us. We are dust – we say as we mark ourselves with ashes – and to dust we shall return.
We hardly need to be reminded of this. We hardly need to be reminded that life is fragile, that we are mortal and that life, in an instant, can be gone. We live that reality every day as we watch friends and loved ones struggle with cancer, as we watch our own bodies betray us, as we glance around the world at the places where war presses down and dries the life out of people.
But there is also – in these ashes that were so recently palms – there is also memory in these ashes. Somehow, I think, these ashes remember the life they once held, the celebrations that those palms brought forth, the vibrancy they once held. And somehow, that memory comes through tonight, in the gritty feel of this ash on our foreheads or the back of our hands – the memory of life that still clings there.
Last weekend, my daughter and I cleaned out our little garden beds in our back yard, getting them ready to plant some vegetables. We cleared out all the debris that had gathered there over the past several months, the dried up stalk of a tomato plant left from last year, the dead leaves that had blown into the corner of the beds and piled there, sticks and twigs and leaves and grass – most of it dead and shriveled up. Even the soil lay flat and gray and lifeless.
But then we started to turn over the soil, dug our shovels deep into the dirt and turned it over on itself, and under that dead gray cover was rich dark soil that held the promise of new life ahead. It was as if the soil – like these palm ashes – once cleared of the dead cover of winter, remembered its vitality, remembered that it knows how to grow life.
This season is kind of like that – it’s time for cleaning out what’s dead and old and keeping the new from growing – whether that’s debris in the garden or last year’s palms, or whatever you are hanging on to that you really need to let go. It’s about clearing all that stuff out so we can remember that there’s life still here, rising up from the ashes.
It’s like John’s father, bringing him the bit of biscuit that tastes of ashes and rain water, sharing communion with him under the wagon as the community surrounded them, as if to say, the reality is this: “You are dust, and dust you shall return,” but the good news that Christ brings is this: “You are a beloved child of God.”
