Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
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