Ash Thursday
As Wednesday broke open, the sky gushed with snowflakes.
And as we watched the wind drift snow from the fields into the narrow country roads and the temperatures dip well below freezing, it did not take long to make the call.
Ash Wednesday would become Ash Thursday.
And maybe it was because I had another day to anticipate the ashes or maybe it was because my heart has been heavy and tired for several weeks now— but either way, I decided:
I was going to stop apologizing for being ashes.
In this season of Lent, I will confess my sin to the Lord.
And I will confess my dust-ness to myself as grace.
Here is what I mean:
Each year, about this time, I find myself spent.
Maybe you do, too.
By the end of February, we are still reeling from the holidays and flu season, snow and bitter cold. Cabin fever is at an all time high, and snow days gift us with long, gray hours to watch the impassable country roads fill up with drifting mounds of snow. This year, our family lost a matriarch and a patriarch, too. Two deep holes in the cold earth; two holes at the table; two holes in our hearts.
And we feel it, don’t we? The frost? The lack of sun and light and life?
Lent begins while the earth is still hard and cold.
And it begins with recognizing our limitations:
We were made from earth, alive only by the utter gift to the Creator’s breath— His Spirit.
In time, we do indeed die.
And in the meantime, we have limits: fatigue, sickness, only-so-much attention, a restricted amount of understanding and experience, situated-ness.
We are human.
Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
But, on Ash Wednesday (or Thursday), we are not confessing these limits as some kind of sin.
We are not asking for pardon because we are made human.
For it is not a sin to be human— to be born from dust and return to dust.
We see this clearly in our Creation story in Genesis 1 and 2. God makes everything good: the human body, the human mind, the human spirit, the human as a whole. The Father gathers dust and breathes, and then He separates, multiplies, and creates again, anew. And He places Himself, His very image, within man and woman both.
He even distinguishes their goodness from the glory of the rest of His creation. Humanity is “very good.”
Humanity is good. And humanity is made of dust.
And yet, it is our tendency to forget one (or both) of these realities.
We forget we are good— and plunge into lives built on shame, striving, fear.
Or we forget we are dust— and delve into lives ignoring our limits, our bodies, even our own death.
And it is this lack of remembering that leads us to sin and our need for confession.
It is not the holy dust that we need pardoning for.
It is our refusal to live in Reality.
It is not our temporality that is damning.
It is our refusal to admit it.
Throughout Lent we confess the result of this spiritual dementia— the ceaseless promotion, the violent protection, the compulsive hoarding. We fast, pray, meet together, and kneel because the consequence of our sin is great. Our participation in darkness is not to be passed off as insignificant. We confess that we are— in both big and small, intentional and unintentional ways— complicit in death all around.
But we do not confess for being dust.
At least, we do not confess to God.
As we receive the ashes, we recall our true reality to ourselves and to one another.
In fact, it is as if Lent intentionally makes this distinction, developing over the forty days:
We begin by recognizing that we have both a universal humble beginning and an unavoidable ending— dust.
And then we acknowledge that we have been both recipients and contributors to the darkness and death in this world.
Lastly, we remind ourselves that we are and will be recipients and contributors to resurrection in this world both now and forever.
These are distinct—and quite necessary— movements throughout the season.
But if you grew up in a faith tradition like mine, you may not have seen the distinction between human frailty and limits and sin.
If you were like me, you may have been encouraged to do the big Kingdom things, to be relentless, to choose the impossible. And while these are good and true messages, at least in part, they are not complimented by the paradox of Christianity. Yes, the Kingdom offers us miracles and healing and excitement and radical living. But there is also pain, sickness, limits, rejection, harm, and simple accidents. We overlook things. We make misinformed decisions. We try our best and mismanage our time or money or energy. We doubt.
And these limits are not innately sinful.
They are simply human.
And God choses, again and again, humanity.
Ash Wednesday prompts us to remember that we are but dust,
and yet— paradoxically— dust that was chosen to be inhabited by God Himself;
dust that is sanctified;
dust that will be resurrected.
Ash Wednesday thrusts us into living this difficult and glorious paradox.
And, my, it is good for our souls.
In fact, I am beginning to believe there is one significant and often unspoken danger in the belief that our given humanity is innately flawed because it is weak:
Confessing the weakness of dust-formation as sin can disillusion us, keeping us from the point and power of confession all along.
Take Jesus and the woman found in the act of adultery. When the wisdom of Jesus sends the stone-throwers packing, He faces the woman and gives two radical statements:
1. I do not condemn you.
2. Go and sin no more.
The first statement undermines the belief that condemnation and conviction are one in the same. Clearly we can fast, confess, and lament while simultaneously living in the mercy and freedom of Christ’s Love. The second statement implies that we can be human and not sin.
And here is where that disillusionment can happen:
If we consciously or unconsciously confess our humanity as “sin” how are we to “sin no more?” Can we cease being human? Can we refuse our limitations? Can we live outside of time, space, culture, bodies, genetics?
No, conviction leads to confession, and confession into transformation.
And we can be transformed human beings.
But we cannot cease to be human.
As I skim through old journals and prayers, I see a trend in many of my most repeated laments and confessions.
For many years, I have been asking for forgiveness in regards to my tiredness, my need for rest, for saying “no,” for feeling sad, for being uninspired, for having deep questions and doubts, for experiencing pain. These prayers are written in a variety of ways and in many contexts, but their underlying hope is the same:
Make me inhuman, oh God. Make me limitless, unaffected, above my dust-ness, beyond my ashes.
Such prayers are self-defeating and will (probably) not be answered. In fact, they take my eyes off my real sin, my real participation with evil, and keep me from transformation. Instead of remembering and honoring my humanity, I’ve spent many years— and many Ash Wednesdays— confessing it, wanting to be free of it.
I remember apologizing to Jackson for watching “The Great British Bake Off” with the kids when I was pregnant with John Taylor and dealing with morning sickness. I felt shame for not exercising during that third trimester; or doing more with the kids when I was recovering from my c-section; or doing less in church during those first few months when we were re-acclimating to our new life.
And I see now there was a heart-wrenching belief at the crux of these “confessions”— that we should be unaffected by our given lives.
I cannot think of a lie that will send us into the abyss of self-defeat and self-hatred any quicker. If we resent our form, we will receive neither freedom from true sin nor the glory of the Spirit’s unmerited grace and closeness.
Scott Erickson has a beautiful piece of art (right) and commentary that illustrates this point so well:
You cannot receive LOVE if you secretly hate who LOVE made you to be.
LOVE wants to pour Itself into you... but you cannot receive It if you’re trying to switch out the container in which you were given to hold that LOVE.
Your very incarnation, your now-ness, is that container.
Say Yes to it.
If we hate our vessel— our humanity— then we will never receive the Life God intends to pour into all of humanity.
Our form, friends, our dust, is not sin.
In fact, I am beginning to wonder if we refuse the first day of Lent, our ashes, can we actually experience the glory of its culmination— resurrection?
To the mother who apologizes for the way her body has changed with each child, your embodied humanity is good.
To the child who has needs, who asks again and again, who insists, your fragile humanity is good.
To every worker who comes home preoccupied and tired, your situated humanity is good.
To those who grieve death and darkness and the hatred all around, your lamenting humanity is good.
To believers who feels desperate, dry, or unsure, your vulnerable humanity is good.
We know that this humanity is good, not flawed, because Christ entered into it— embodied, fragile, situated, lamenting, and vulnerable— and He was holy and never sinned, never participated in evil while human.
So today I am still thinking and asking and moving to the rubber-meets-the-actual-road application:
How do we acknowledge—and maybe even honor— our dust-ness?
And not just on Ash Wednesday but on Ash Thursday and Ash Next-Monday-Afternoon, too?
Maybe, when I identify an area of sin or participated in something less-than-Life, I will confess that darkness. And then, maybe, I will ask another question: What is my “dust” saying to me?
Am I reacting with unnecessary harshness with my children?
Then where are my limits being pushed beyond what I can handle? Do I need more sleep? Some help? A friend? Someone to talk to? A few hours away to recenter?
Have I spoken unkindly behind someone’s back?
Am I actually trying to feel known? Appreciated? Significant? Earn some kind of status?
Are my heart and actions seeped with pride?
Am I believing a lie about my true identity? My worthiness of love? Am I afraid that I will be overlooked, ignored, and left alone?
Am I struggling to release resentment, clinging to offense and harm, refusing forgiveness?
Have I received forgiveness myself? Have I chosen to forgive in steps and stages, rebuilding trust when I can, when possible? And when it isn’t possible, can I pray for another’s— even an enemy’s— good?
When Ash Thursday finally came, I watched Jackson hold a maroon, clay pot in his hands. The pot was made by Jackson’s father, Marselle. And each year, when he pulls it off the shelf and mixes the ashes with olive oil until smooth, I know that others will hold a piece of our lives and serve others from it.
Our passings will echo to others that they too will someday see God, and as Lent teaches us over forty days, we are desperate for grace to make our fragile yet wondrous existence count.
And as the ashes are smeared across my forehead, I am reminded that our very bodies, our very humanity, are marked by the glory of our great need for the cross and the resurrection.
This great need is a holy one, indeed. A need that is met in the revelation in a God-Man, Christus Victor, who takes not only our sin, but even our greatest human weakness and alleviates death forever.
A possibly necessary caveat: within this essay, I am not arguing for/against sinful nature here or anything of the sort. I have no qualifications for making such statements. Simply acknowledging God’s grace in human weakness.