ash wednesday
The church trilogy I started this week will conclude tomorrow.
For now, an interruption for a few Ash Wednesday thoughts about death and living and hope and heaven and I don’t know what.
It’s Ash Wednesday, and I grew up in a denomination that leans heavy into the Lenten season. We love our ashes. We love to remind each other that we came from dust and will return to dust, i.e., we will die.
In my small-town Lutheran church, Lent was the only time we gathered on Wednesday nights. While the other churches in town always had Wednesday night prayer meetings and extra services and youth group activities, we didn’t find that midweek obligation necessary most of the year.
But in Lent, we thought we ought to get together more than once a week. All that fasting and reflecting on death to do, you know?
To be fair, though, my childhood memories of Lent aren’t really that focused on death or self-denial at all.
They mostly revolve around soup and pancakes.
First, Shrove Tuesday the night before Lent begins, our little fellowship hall Mardi Gras, stuffing our faces with pancakes and bacon. The tradition, I suppose, comes from the intent of using up all the sweets and fats that you’ll be abstaining from in the Lenten season. Even though we mostly observed Lent Lite, without a whole lot of meaningful fasting to follow, we enjoyed our syrupy pancakes anyway.
Wednesday nights after that were only slightly more somber, as we gathered for a short church service and to eat soup. I seem to recall that the idea was again related to Lenten discipline and restraint, soup being a more meager meal. Most of the sweet farming wives who provided the food for these potlucks missed that memo, though, and our Lenten soup meals were closer to feasts of course, with plenty of bread and desserts and sweet tea too, even if some people had committed to give up at least one of those for 40 days.
I still really love Lent, even though I don’t remember the last time I actually participated in the discipline by fasting from anything. I usually try to “take up a practice” for Lent instead, and those usually quickly go the way of New Year’s Resolutions.
But I love the idea of a season of the church dedicated to the opposite of living your best life now. Nothing could be more contrary to American culture, or indeed to the culture of the American church at large, than spending 40 whole days in remembrance of Jesus fasting in the wilderness and resisting the temptation to pave a quick path to power and success.
I mean, paving a path to heaven while living a happy and prosperous life in the meantime is kinda the American evangelical dream, right? Lent stands in stark contrast, and instead of finding that depressing, I find it oddly hopeful in its honesty.
Kate Bowler says, in the introduction to one of many Lenten devotional plans I’ve started but never finished:
Frankly, Lent is my favorite part of the church calendar because it is a time when the whole church is on the losing team. A time when we all get a minute to tell the truth: Life is so beautiful and life is so hard. For everyone.
In that small Lutheran church where I grew up, faith was Jesus and symbolic rituals and sweet old ladies who knew how to cook. I learned Bible stories and that Jesus loved me, and when I was 13, I was Confirmed, Holy Spirit fire in my chest affirming all I needed to know, that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
And then I tumbled out into a larger world of evangelicalism, and, oddly enough, that’s when I actually started to get more concerned about death.
Because, besides reflecting on our mortality every Ash Wednesday, every Lent, we didn’t spend a whole lot of our time talking about death or what comes after it.
Heaven was a given, referred to occasionally, mostly in an “our Father who art in Heaven” sort of way, and hell wasn’t much of a concern.
I think it’s funny that my friends and family who didn’t grow up with Lent and Ash Wednesday find them macabre… when their evangelical upbringings talked about eternity in hell on the regular, which seems like much more of a downer. (But I guess you get used to it.)
Ash Wednesday reminds us we will die as a matter of fact, but just think about how much emphasis evangelical Christianity puts on death and what comes after. Some brands of Christianity essentially make the whole thing about death, reducing the whole point of life to settling where you’ll end up after you die.
If you live in the South like me, you’ve seen the billboards. You know.
And it’s endlessly perplexing to me how eternal destination is the basket where we’ve decided to put all our eggs.
Let’s take something we know next to nothing about—what happens after we die to whatever is us besides the body that decays—and focus on our beliefs about that. That which we have no way to prove, and on which the Bible speaks very little and always slant. Let’s take what little we know about unfathomable mystery, blend a bunch of passages of Scripture into a purée, and then let’s make the resulting formula the crux of our religion, our faith, our message to the world.
Let’s make the crux of the cross about something that happens when we’re gone instead of about what happened then and what’s happening now.
I used to weep and gnash my teeth about all the eternity stuff quite a bit, wanting to make sure I understood it and got it right.
Now I mostly just think about it when my son is asking me about his great-grandparents he never met and if they’ll ever “come back to life in this world.” Or about when he will die and if he’ll ever come back to life.
Yes, you will. Yes, they will, I want to assure him because I do believe the resurrection of Jesus points forward to that. But I also want to make sure I’m as honest as I can be about the “I don’t know” of it all, which is hard to do with my child who demands unequivocal answers.
He’s not alone in wanting answers that are certain. I hear people say, when someone has died, that they don’t know how people without faith get through the loss. What do you do if you’re not assured that you’ll be reunited in heaven?
And I feel very conflicted inside as I shake my head heavily in apparent agreement while thinking but never saying, “How do any of us get through it?”
I can’t decide if faith makes it easier or not.
Far-sighted as I am, I’m not sure what to think about what happens after here. Just trying to make it through here and now without an existential crash and burn takes all the faith I can muster.
I’m not clinging to Jesus to stay out of hell or to get to heaven.
In fact, He’s the one holding on to me, just to get me through now.
And I know that seems overstated. The life I live is easily in the top 0.000001% of easiest lives in the history of this planet. What do I possibly have to get through?
Just knowing that we’re here now and one day we won’t be—isn’t that enough to cause us all to have a crisis? What do we do with the weight of the miracle that we’re here? How do we live under the crushing responsibility of that gift—or that burden—in a way that is meaningful?
Maybe all those years of imposition of ashes have made me this way. Maybe all this reflection on mortality is the problem.
Or maybe it is a blessing. An absolute blessing never to forget for too long that we are finite and we were made this way.
Yes, I am dust.
But I live with the wondrous conviction that the reason this dust of mine has breath is because God Himself breathed it into me.
I know that sounds like just as much of a fairy tale as our popular notions of heaven. Maybe it’s just another self-soothing delusion?
And, I do question constantly if it can really be true. Sometimes it seems like maybe it is all just an accident, or a miracle, of the universe. Maybe we’re all just fooling ourselves, constructing our little meanings to hold onto when we’re really all just dust doing the best we can for however long it lasts.
But, then that is so hopeless I just can’t go on with it.
So I guess I am one of those people, after all, who thinks, I just don’t know how people get through life without faith.
I don’t have to know what comes next (at least not now, maybe that’s a luxury of relative youth). But I do need to know that this flesh and bone is here by design, that sun and water and oxygen don’t just sustain our lives by chance.
I need to know this life has meaning—which can be found without Christian faith; I won’t argue it can’t be.
But for me, only Jesus will do. It’s Christian faith that tells me I’m here on purpose. It’s the story of God stooping to the clay, forming humanity with His hands, breathing air into our lungs, that gives me faith that we are not happenstance but meaningful. That we are not untethered bundles of atoms and synapses and hormones but humans, made by the source of pure love with the purpose of radiating pure love.
And it’s the story of that same God stooping to earth wrapped in the same dusty flesh. It’s the story of how He redeems humanity, redeems all the ways we fail at our purpose by living that purpose fully Himself—the very image of love to His dying breath.
And I know I’m not making any arguments that don’t require some suspension of disbelief. I’m not really aiming for proof.
I’m just trying to explain, and to remind myself again, that I do believe Jesus rose again to life and lives even now.
I hope in Jesus for now.
I hope in Him because of the way He makes me believe that life is worth living and people are worth loving. Even when neither seems true.
And, when I think about going back to dust, I feel God inhale, the life He breathed into being returning to Him.
I don’t think about golden streets or glory, about clouds or crowns. I didn’t grow up with the right songs for that.
But I do think about peace and rest. I think about returning to the source of love that made us. And I hope for a time when we are all made whole and all is made right.
So maybe I do hope for heaven after all. A heaven that is already working on making us whole and animating us with love here and now.
I keep a red hardback copy of the Lutheran Book of Worship close at hand. My maiden name is printed on the cover, a gift presented in honor of my college graduation by my home congregation, mere weeks before I would marry and change that name and move away.
They fed me all those years with pancakes and soup and hope in Jesus, and then they sent me out into the world with benedictions like this one, from the order of service for Ash Wednesday:
Go forth into the world to serve God with gladness;
be of good courage;
hold fast to that which is good;
render to no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted; support the weak;
help the afflicted; honor all people;
love and serve God, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Thanks be to God.