Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

Ash Wednesday is such an emotional experience for me. I don’t remember attending this gateway to Lent back when I was a kid. Finding my way back to church as an adult, after being away for almost twenty years, I attended a UCC church, and I don’t remember this service there either. Perhaps it has to do with the incredibly intense emotional environment I was in the first time I experienced the imposition of ashes.

When I first joined Gethsemane, my daughter was eleven years old. I’ve mentioned in previous postings how challenging she was to raise. Her difficulties have always seemed to be on an escalating trajectory, with very few plateaus. You can use your imagination for the pre-puberty years. My mother’s heart was so battered already, I doubted my endurance for the coming teen saga. Although I had remarried, there were parent duties I just didn’t ask my husband to do. So I was her only transportation to and from school, for any activities or play dates, and frequently for visits with her father or grandmother. Consequently, I didn’t do much on my own, and definitely no evening activities. Ash Wednesday was out of the question.

By the time our daughter was knocking on door number thirteen, her dad and I had worked out a different custody plan where she would live with his mother. This new plan spelled out visitation for me on Wednesday afternoons after school, and weekends.

On Ash Wednesday this particular year, I had planned on attending service for the first time. I was supposed to have our daughter back to her grandmother’s after dinner, but I figured I’d still have time to make service. I waited for her outside the school gate, and the minute she saw me, she launched into a tantrum, yelling and screaming, crying, almost spitting she was so mad. We got in the car and she showed no sign of letting up. I called her dad and informed him I was bringing her immediately to his mother’s, because I was not going to spend my afternoon in this fashion. His mom was out, so he told me to wait for him at her apartment. I told him to hurry.

When we met up with him, I kissed her good-bye. She was still yelling. I had kept my composure the whole time, but it broke as soon as I hit the freeway to go home. Church and this service of mortality was my refuge from the storm.

I cried through all the hymns. I was so weary, so tired of feeling inadequate, so far away from joy for so very long. Somehow I was reluctant to receive the imposition of ashes. This declaration of vulnerability was intimidating, but I went forward and knelt. After smudging my forehead, “remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” Pastor laid her hand on my head for a moment and I wept. The pain was all still there, but somehow I felt safe here, safe enough to admit being broken. This was a time to be still and just know the reality.

Eventually, I would come to grips with the fact that this pain wasn’t my whole story. There was more to life, to me, and I could find it and live with all of it, including the pain.

Ash Wednesday/Lent is like a pause, a time for intentional quiet, to focus within, but also to consider a broader perspective of our human condition. Like the image of the mythic phoenix dissolving into ashes before glorious rebirth, my emotional response to Ash Wednesday is like a cleansing, preparing me for the glory of the resurrection, once more.