ASH WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2020

In 1993 the date of Ash Wednesday was February 25. I was living in St. Paul, MN at the time. It was a bitter cold day, snow piled high along the city streets and in the parking lots. I had a doctor’s appointment in the early afternoon and then errands to run. I was exhausted by the time I got home, and given my condition, I toyed with the idea of staying in, contemplating my mortality in solitude and going to bed early. But I rallied and clambered back into my winter gear, wedged myself into the car again and drove across town to a Lutheran Church. I sat closer to the front where it was warmer, and as I sat down, I felt a deep, urgent pain like nothing I had ever experienced before. I took deep, measured breaths and held very still, hoping it would pass. It subsided, but it returned. I debated leaving, but it would have been so obvious, so I remained — surely I could make it through the sermon, and I did. Through the next hymn, and I did. Through the prayers and the imposition of ashes, and I did. Through the benediction, and then I charged out to the parking lot, begging my neighbors to move their cars as quickly as possible, so I could get out of there. I was in labor, and barely four hours later my daughter was born. I bore the emblem of death on my forehead as I brought new life into the world.

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We live in the shadow of our end from our very beginning, and this somber proclamation at the beginning of every Lenten season is always sobering, sometimes terrifying. There is a school of thought in the early church that believed that Adam and Eve were created good but not complete. The fulfillment of their destiny and their return to God would be marked by some kind of transition, some passage from the earthly realm into the fullness of God’s kingdom, when, as St. Paul puts it, the perishable would put on imperishability. The fall into sin, which spread darkness throughout the creation, also left its deforming mark on the prospect of our end. It claimed death as a fearsome punishment and weaponized it to cause us fear and despair. The burden is inescapable. It takes extraordinary grace to be like St. Francis of Assisi, who confidently addresses this reality as “most gentle sister death, waiting to hush our final breath.”

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” — these words, while they should humble us, do not demean us. They speak not to the vanity of our existence but to the urgency of our lives. The fact that our days are numbered, that they are passing, challenges us not to waste them. We begin Lent with a detailed litany of our sins. We come together to name what is wrong so that together we may repent, that is, turn away from the old failings and answer God’s call to discipleship anew. “Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!” exclaims St. Paul. It is a moment of reckoning; it is a moment of recovery; it is a new beginning, as once again we travel the way of the cross with our Lord, the way that leads us through this passage of time into eternity.

Go out this night with the mark of mortality on your forehead, and bring new life into the world. Amen.