For the love of Ash Wednesday

This year, Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday. Put another way, Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day. It presents a conundrum. If you’re Catholic, a rather peculiar conundrum as both are holy days in the church calendar—one pretty a much a secular holiday, one, well, decidedly not. Let’s just say that if, like a good Catholic, you’ve eaten all your chocolate on Shrove Tuesday, the traditional day for clearing all the good stuff out of the pantry in preparation for the fasting that accompanies Lent, your beloved is going to find it pretty slim pickin’s on February 14.

But it’s not just our Catholic sisters and brothers who are searching for a solution to this year’s church calendar. One pastor I know stood up in the pulpit last week and asked her affluent, mostly Boomer generation congregation to cancel any dinner reservations that had been made for February 14 and come to Ash Wednesday services instead. It didn’t go well. Boomers, as it turns out, don’t want to talk about death, focus on death, contemplate their own death, listen to a sermon about death, or attend any kind of a worship service that includes the words: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Valentine’s Day gives them any number of great excuses to avoid the ashes. “My wife would never forgive me.” “This is my partner’s big chance to prove she’s a romantic. It would break her heart not to take me out.” “I made reservations. They’ll charge me anyway if I don’t show up.”

My guess is that Ash Wednesday makes us Boomers just a little nervous, uncomfortable even. We’re the generation that could barely imagine life after 30. We’re the generation that wondered if Valentine’s Day love would even exist when we were 64. Who wouldn’t rather eat chocolate on Wednesday?

The truth is that we Boomers are a lot closer to dust than we used to be. As are we all.

Which is why, when we have a choice, we should go all in on Ash Wednesday and take our beloved out to dinner next weekend.  Ash Wednesday is a gift to each one of us, old and young, a gift from the church, a gift of our Christian tradition, the ashes a reminder that we are finite creatures, small, limited, dependent, broken, a reminder that God is God and we are not, that God is in charge, and we are not.

I find myself every now and then laboring under the burden of the  fiction that I am all that and a bag of chips, that the universe is defined by what I can know of it, that with effort and intention and the appropriate resources, there is nothing that I cannot control. Intellectually, theoretically, up here in my head, I do know that I am a creature and that I have a limited lifespan. But in my heart and in my gut, my monkey brain, if you will, I haven’t quit accepted that I, in all my glory, am one of the created, rather than the creator.

We have pushed our mortality out the door, removing any signs of death from our daily lives. My mother lived on a farm, where death was a part of life. When her grandmother died, her mom and her aunts laid grandma out in the farmhouse’s front parlor. And each of them took a turn keeping vigil over the body, including my eight year old mother. Now, to hear my friends at the funeral home down the street tell it, death is too often hidden, as if dad just went out to the Wawa and didn’t come home.

Ash Wednesday is a gift of the church to the church, a reminder that we are mortal, created, finite, that we are, in fact, not all that and a bag of chips. For the good times, the days when everything goes just right and the world is our oyster, Ash Wednesday reminds us that all that we have and all that we are is a gift of our Creator, that we are dust and God is not.

And for the hard days, the bad days, the really, really sad days, Ash Wednesday reminds us that God holds even our grief, our loss, our end in his hands. To face our own deaths, or the deaths of those whom we love, is unthinkable without the assurance that, although our lives are grass, soon forgotten, the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. We are held in the hands of the One who created us out of dust. And as we return to dust, we are held in the hands of the One who loves us enough to give for us his own life.

Celebrate Ash Wednesday this year. Come to church. Receive the ashes. Drink from the cup of salvation. Eat from the bread of life. Celebrate Ash Wednesday this year. Celebrate true love.