ASH WEDNESDAY

It is over a week since we observed Ash Wednesday. Its message continues to linger gently on my mind. I have been observing Ash Wednesday for some 81 years. My assumption is that I was in a church service on at least 80 of those years. Yet as I try to recall early memories of those observances my mind goes blank for about the first 60 years! I wonder why. I do not attribute it to repressed memories because of the Ash Wednesday focus on mortality. I do not fear death. Nor can my lack of memory (I think) result from the fact that for many years Ash Wednesday marked the day I stopped all alcohol consumption for those 40 sacred days. For whatever reason, those earlier memories refuse to come up.

All that changed for me, however, some 20 years ago. Then I was introduced to what was for me a new liturgical tradition: that is the imposition of ashes. In this ritual the presiding minister uses ashes to make the sign of the cross on each person’s forehead and pronounces upon each individual the solemn fact, “Remember that you are dust; and to dust you will return.”

For me this is neither frightening nor upsetting. I embrace my mortality believing that even after physical death I will have an abundant life with Christ, which is far better.

The long slow procession of persons to the minister for ashes does provide a wonderful time for introspection and reflection. One of the streams that flow through my mind is the recollection of those who were with us last year, but not this year. Last Wednesday my mind immediately went to my brother Hal who died in January. I was again struck by the fact that we are nine children; he is number six in birth order, yet was the first to die. That helps me recall especially those who have experienced the death of a younger sibling or more specifically the death of a child. While death is normal, we expect it to follow some normal patterns. When it doesn’t, we try to cope with that apparent break in the natural order of things.

After noting those who are not in the procession this year because they have gone before us, I look at my fellow members and think of other loses they are going through. There is Becky mourning the loss of her spouse because of divorce. There is Harry whose teen-age son has not spoken to him since last Ash Wednesday. I look at Sandra whose mother’s Alzheimer’s-vacant eyes can no longer identify her child. There is Larry, laid off from his job for the first time in his 23 year career. And I surely do not expect slow- walking Martha to still be with us next Ash Wednesday. Losses, finitude, dust.

Of course it does get very personal. I too shall return to dust. I recall the words of recently deceased writer John Updike, former Lutheran Christian. His poem “Requiem:” with its easy meter and simple rhythm seems to almost trivialize death; yet it touches my soul.

REQUIEM

It came to me the other day.
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full,
Of promise, depth unplumbable! “

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise.
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

But my thoughts do not stop there. Instead they direct me to the end of Lent: to Easter