Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day that marks the beginning of the Lenten season which culminates on Easter Sunday. Easter is the cornerstone of the entire Christian faith. Without the resurrection that occurred on the first Easter morning, Jesus would have been a maniac instead of a Savior. Without Easter, the birth of Christ would have no meaning now. The resurrection is a sign that in a world of false Messiahs, Christ was in fact the only true God. It is also a symbol for the life God can and does raise in His Bride.

Last year was the first year that I participated in Lent and it was one of the richest times of my spiritual journey. During those 40 days, I experienced some of my most terrifying and depressing moments, but those moments did not take away from the lessons I was learning or the process I was going through. As someone who is self-addicted about 95% of the time, Lent is a season where I force myself to focus on giving something up, where I make myself examine my heart and see what it truly looks like without the façade.

As I have stopped to ponder the significance of Ash Wednesday, I’ve thought about a lot of things. My church does not have an Ash Wednesday service, but in traditional services the clergyman will use ashes to place a cross on the congregants’ foreheads which most will leave on until after sundown. Though I haven’t ever experienced this myself, I think it’s a really beautiful idea. That ash-drawn cross is a reminder that life is not about me and my own pursuits. It is a sign to the world that today is a day set apart to focus on humility in the light of the cross.

In faith, it is always easier to brush over the hard truths and instead focus upon the ones that promise peace or joy or fellowship. I think of Ash Wednesday as a day to ask God what sin really looks like. I know that I have no true concept of sin. I don’t understand its weight or its consequences. I don’t understand how one lie is just as sinful as molesting a child. Even certain things performed out of goodness can be sinful depending on the motivations behind them. To better understand sin, it is also important to better understand grace. When considering sin, one must also consider that the God who created us and gave us free will was also willing to take on the sins of his creatures and die a brutal, humiliating death. The bitter truth of sin and Good Friday are very dark ideas but they are illuminated as the Church looks forward to the resurrection.

All throughout the day I have been thinking about and listening to the Hold Steady’s song, “How a Resurrection Really Feels.”  These are the lyrics to the first verse:

Her parents named her Hallelujah, the kids all called her Holly
If she scared you then she’s sorry
She’s been stranded at these parties
These parties, they start lovely but they get druggy and they get ugly and they get bloody

The priest just kinda laughed
The deacon caught a draft
She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass
She was limping left on broken heels
When she said, “Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?”

The song ends with the repeated refrain of “Walk on back.” I think that is what the season of Lent is all about. It is about seeing yourself as Hallelujah, to see the brokenness and the weariness and the limping. It is about knowing human depravity and weakness. It is about mourning sin and its power to destroy.

Ash Wednesday is about all of these things, but it is also a time to look forward and to walk back. It begins a time of preparation for the resurrection.  Easter should never be just another Christian holiday but should be a time when the Church is reminded of hope and renewal and redemption.

Though I don’t have a cross on my forehead today, I am thinking about ashes and what they symbolize. Ashes are what remain after a fire. They show what once was, but not in any recognizable way. In a sense, I am very much like a pile of ashes. I exist and I can be seen, but all that is left is a pile of dirt. We are not who we were meant to be. We were created in the image of God to be just a little lower than the angels. After the Fall, we turned to ashes. Death entered the world. Punishment and brokenness made their way into humanity. All that was left of the beauty of Eden was ashes, a bitter reminder of what was left after the destruction of sin.

But ashes can be easily removed or washed away. In spite of humanity’s brokenness, there is hope. There is restoration. There is grace, grace that gives us back the life we were intended to live. It is grace that enables us to tell anyone how a resurrection feels.

---