Photo by Pro Church Media
The Pandemic has not stopped churches from figuring out creative ways to give our faith communities ashes that are usually given with the sign of the cross on a person’s forehead. There will be fewer services where ashes are placed on peoples’ heads, but churches have figured out creative ways to honor this tradition.
Some are placing the ashes on the forehead with a cotton ball, and others are sprinkling the ashes on the heads of people. You can get ashes as “take out” at a train station. I have seen where ashes can be done by zoom as well. Some churches are delivering ashes to those who are homebound by sending them in an envelope by mail. Others are sending a Lenten daily reminder which includes scripture and prayers.
The Ash Wednesday service was a big deal in the school where I served as Head Chaplain. Students, faculty and members of the school community could also come by the offices of the chaplains throughout the day to receive the ashes. Hundreds would stop by.
Why does it seem even more important this year than it mattered before? Remember that Ash Wednesday 2020 was one of the last moments of public expressions of our faith in our parishes or faith-based schools. It was a few weeks later that the Covid-19 Virus took hold and started our time of trial in a different wilderness. This year Ash Wednesday will help us feel a bit more normal in our daily religious deliberations and “normal” is a desired feeling by all. This year is filled with hope for our future life. Our world has become too aware of the possibility of death that has surrounded us each and every day. We as a world know mortality as we have heard those Ash Wednesday words said with the administration of the ashes on foreheads as our daily mantra in our hearts and souls, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
Ash Wednesday and Lent are days to remember our mortality, but it is also a day and season to remember how to live. The following is a sermon that I gave to the EA community during my last Ash Wednesday service as Chaplain of the School before retiring:
“The season of Lent begins today on Ash Wednesday. It starts forty days of preparation for Jesus in the wilderness before he begins his earthly ministry. It is a day where we hear the words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”, reminding us of our mortality.
It is a time marked with hardship in the wilderness experienced by Jesus and the necessity for change before he begins his earthly ministry.
One of the movies that I used in Ethics Class is ‘Before and After’ which has, as one of its themes, that your life can turn on a dime, and you never know when it is coming. You are one way one day and in a very different place on another, not bad necessarily but different.
During any change we lose something and we gain something else. That’s the way it is.
This Lent will take on new meaning for me as I go about losing my formal role as your Chaplain and gaining a new chapter in my life still to be determined, but certainly there will be more time with family. Loss and gain are the ebb and flow of life. It is the ebb and flow of Lent.
I have been doing the hard job of packing and sorting through boxes of memorabilia to get ready to move. I was surprised by some of the things that I encountered. I was slowed down by reading notes to me and re-living times in my own life and in the lives of others that changed drastically and not for the best. Yes, they were balanced out by those letters that caused me to smile and to remember sharing in the pure joy of someone’s most joyous moment in life.
Lent is also a time when Jesus was constantly surprised by challenges…to be given power…to be given food and drink…all things to make his life easier.
When I was going through the boxes, I was surprised at the things that I forgot. I forgot the way that I was as a young person and not remembering that person but knowing that time empowered me. Jesus is in the wilderness in hardship but propelled forward by it.
I was going through one box when my identification badge from the steel mill where I worked as a laborer to pay for college fell out of a group of notes. My picture was encased in a one inch by two-inch steel badge with only the words Alan Wood Steel Company, the name of the steel mill. Stamped on it was the number 368, not a name just a number. It was very much like how they identify you in prisons. What stared back at me was a kid with black frame glasses who was doing his best to communicate that he was a tough guy, flexed neck, and eyes that said ‘I am not afraid of anything.’
What it didn’t show was a kid who was scared to death that he wouldn’t be able to do the difficult jobs in conditions that would be outlawed today in the steel industry and knowing that this was the only way that I would I get what I wanted…college. In Ethics Class we learn that “walls are there to show us how much we want something.”
After the first 10 hours day, my father picked me up at the mill. He took one look at me and was in shock. I was black from head to toe with coal dust. I was working in the plant where they turn coal into coke to be the fuel used in the open-hearth ovens to create the steel. I just responded with “It’s OK. Forget about it!”
I think that what it has taken me a lifetime to really learn existentially (that means experience right in the moment) is that you must embrace it all…the good times and the bad…not like it all, but embrace it all. Both are necessary to lose and to gain and to change.
I heard someone recently say that when you die you will know that you have died because the faces on the angels who greet you will be those of your family members who have gone before us. That will be true for me. ...my mother, my father, my brother, my daughter and so many from my EA family. That was true for Jesus. In his case it the face of his God and Father.
Lent for me is an existential experience to embrace it all and live it all right now. I don’t think the Jesus that I know was thinking about what happened the day before or what he was going to be facing the next day. When you read the scripture, you feel that he concentrates on what is occurring right in that moment.
I recently read the faith paper of eighth grade student who also gave her faith paper as a Middle School Chapel Address a few weeks back. I have her permission to share one of her thoughts with you. She knows something of joy and sorrow as she lost her mother to cancer just a few years ago.
She said the following: “I hope to live each day as if it is my last and seize the moment. Anything that we can do or say that makes us or someone else feel great, do it. We never know what is waiting around the corner. The Dalai Lama said, ‘There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday, and the other is called tomorrow, so today is the right day to love, believe, do, and mostly live’. My faith has guided me so that I can move on.’
She is an eighth-grade student who has embraced it all…wise beyond her years…she lives from a deeper spot…experiencing more than most experience in a lifetime. She is what some would call an ‘old soul’. I hope that we can all move through Lent with her wisdom attached to our souls.
Because “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.”’
Commentaires