When I was a kid, I used to marvel at the Catholic kids when they arrived at school on Ash Wednesday. Little sooty crosses were on their foreheads, often smudged into some other unrecognizable shape or simply joining forces with the other dirt that tends to cling to kids. I was intrigued, but also thankful that I had been spared this sort of marking.
The other kids informed me that the smudges were “ashes for Lent.” This only confused me a bit more, as the only ashes that I saw routinely were the ones in the bottom of the burn barrel in our backyard. It was my job to haul the trash out of our house every few days and burn it in the burn barrel. Cardboard cereal boxes, used paper towels, newspapers – you name it – all of it went up in flames. For a budding nine or ten year old pyromaniac, this was sheer bliss.
Les tells me that our ashes for Ash Wednesday services here at Bering come from a company called SACCO. You can order Ash Wednesday ashes on-line. The place guarantees that their ashes are made from burning palm leaves, although I suppose that they could slip the occasional cereal box in there and no one would be the wiser.
Ashes were a sign of mourning during biblical times. Back then, if one of your loved ones died you threw ashes on yourself and maybe rolled around in the dirt for good measure. It would have been considered quite gauche to show up at a funeral looking all neat and tidy. So why do we use ashes on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, instead of Good Friday?
We begin Lent by recognizing the need to mourn our losses. This is decidedly anti-American, where we celebrate our victories whole-heartedly and try desperately to ignore our failures. We go so far as to tell each other to suck it up a bit. Don’t dwell on losing. We are separated into winners and losers; those who have learned to play the game well and those who have somehow fallen short.
The thing is, acknowledging the fact that we tend to screw up, that we do the wrong thing or fail to do the right thing, frees us in extraordinary ways. To say that we are sinners, to throw ourselves upon the good will and mercy of God, is to acknowledge that we aren’t God, and what a relief that is. All of the weirdness of fruit-eating naked people and talking snakes aside, the story of the Garden of Eden has remarkable insight into human nature. We are screw-ups. It ultimately doesn’t matter if Augustine says that we are sinful at conception (which is total B.S., in my opinion) or if social gospel theologians say that we are corrupted by the world or if other theologians say that we can avoid sin if we just tried a little harder. We sin. It is what it is. The challenge is to examine ourselves and our actions with relentless honesty. It’s not particularly pleasant. What we inevitably discover is that we act in our own self-interest much of the time. Our egos dictate our path. God has taken a back seat, and so have others.
As we examine our own actions and begin to fully realize their impact, we are filled with regrets. Our failures are our losses, and we mourn them.
Psalm 51:6-17 has a great take on this.
Also take a look at Matthew 9: 12-13
Luke 18:10-14
1st John 1:9
I was visiting with a young man the other day who is very sick. I asked him if he would like to pray, and he said yes. I began praying for healing in the biggest and broadest sense, for courage and peace for the journey ahead, and he stopped me in the middle of the prayer. I have never had that happen before. The guy stopped me right in the middle of the prayer. He said, “My Mom always told me to ask for forgiveness before I pray.”
Wow. This blew me away.
I realized how easily and often i skip over that messy part of prayer. I can mumble the “forgive our trespasses” line with everybody else, but when it comes to personal prayer I sortr of skim over that “I have sinned, please forgive me” part. I figure when God hears from me that God already knows that I am a total screw-up. I forget the importance of saying and knowing it myself. Once I empty myself in this way, once I adopt an attitude of humility, once I remove this man-made egotistic barrier between myself and God, I can begin to grow spiritually. That’s why we prepare ourselves in this way on Ash Wednesday. That’s why we do penitence.
A few questions to discuss:
How do you define sin?
Does the story of Adam and Eve help you with the concept of sin? Has it created problems with your construct of sin?
How do societal constructs of sin and Christian constructs of sin differ?
Is it important to FEEL forgiven?
What else might the ashes symbolize? What does Ash Wednesday mean to you?
I followed the link over from Rachel suggestion/(Rajen’s) blog just to see what your blog was like. I have to say that your sermons that you have posted are NOTHING like anything I ever heard when going to church when I was younger. As someone who is very much not religious and has lately been struggling quite a bit even with the whole faith issue I’m impressed with much of what you write. I find myself wondering if I had heard stuff like this when I was younger if I would find the path to faith easier today. Instead I was taught a lot of hatred, how God punishes, how I can never be good enough which is part of what I still struggle with. While I don’t know if I will ever find my way to religion, I hope to at some point find my way to faith. I think to help that maybe I should keep visiting your blog since I can’t visit your church. Houston is a ways away from California and even farther from Washington.
Good prayer-blog for day after Ash Wednesday. I missed last night’s service for ash marking; traditionally, I’m more of a “before school” person for that act of penitence. Trish: Thanks for taking on this lenten discussion; I look forward to some online participation since it’s tough to make it to church in the evenings right now. I wish you the best for this evening’s conversation. Also, thanks for today’s healthy dose of humor: I wonder how much our back yard burn-offs have contributed to the climate crisis.
Your musings continue to astound and shock me – all in good ways. Enormously appreciate the (sometimes brutal) honesty and eye-popping phrases. Too often, biblical language is a mile away and it prevents direct access to God. Your spin and way of speaking bring God immediately to mind and to heart; that is a prophetic gift with which you have been graced. Work it. What gets me most in this penitence thoughttrain is your admission that you forget to genuinely seek forgiveness when entering prayer; you are not alone. Too many times, that Sunday “mumble” is the bargaining chip I use to wipe my slate clean. I too need to join you in being more forthright with myself, God and others in seeking and offering forgiveness. Let this be that prayerful moment.