Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Within the church calendar, Lent is to Easter as Advent is to Christmas. It is a period of preparation. For the cross. For the resurrection. A period of preparation that begins with “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
The story that begins with the God of the universe putting on human flesh and entering the world through blood and water, ends as all human stories must: with death.
Christianity, predicated on following the footsteps of Christ — is about descent and not ascent. It is about surrender, it is about gratitude, it is about becoming nothing because, as Father Richard Rohr would say, “when we are nothing we are in a fine position to receive everything from God.”
And so on this day, we participate in a symbolism that holds together two things. The cross that is marked on our forehead is made of two elements, ash, from the palm branches of the Palm Sunday past, and this ash represents the dirt and mess of life. And oil, which represents the anointing of holy and sacred beings. Oil was poured on the foreheads of those being anointed to be kings or in positions of high and holy power. And so can we see the crosses of Ash Wednesday as a combination of both dirty and holiness; of messy and yet sacred promise?
In talking through our upcoming services with my husband Ryan this week (he is also a United Methodist Pastor) he shared something with me that I had never learned before. He said that the anointing happened on the forehead in the Ancient Times because it was believed that your hair was the gate to your soul. Because the roots of hair run deep, long or short, hair is very deep. It’s like the body and soul’s antennas transmitting energy from a higher realm, while also exuding the deepest, most inner parts of one’s being. Which is why we use the forehead for this cross. We hold on our foreheads a mixture of mess and promise; dirt and oil, sin and purity…but isn’t our life a combination or both of these things. Don’t we all live in these tensions every day as we walk with Jesus?
If Lent is the somber reminder of our human condition, then Easter declares that there is hope, but that hope lies not in escaping our humanity but in journeying through it. Because Lent also points us to the inevitability of suffering and how, even as followers of Jesus, we don’t get a “get out of suffering free” card. We know the hard truth that life without suffering does not exist.
One of my favorite authors, Rachel Held Evans reminds us, in Searching for Sunday, that healing comes when we “enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome.”
Anoint it as holy. Think about that.
What would happen if we really believed that? That our suffering, our neighbors’ suffering, was holy? Holy not because God delights in suffering but because God came and joined us within it. Holy in the same way that Communion is holy — the spilled blood, the broken body — because Christ comes and meets us there. Not symbolically, but sacramentally. Incarnationally.
And so tonight, if you are receiving the imposition of ashes at our worship service remember that you are mortal. That you are human (with all the perils and frailty the term implies). And remember that being human is a holy thing. That our mortality is a holy thing. Sanctified by the One who came, the One who died, and the One who rose again.
May we all have courage to face our deaths and walk more fully into life.