So What's with the Ashes Anyway?

Home is where one starts from.  As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

of dead and living.

-T.S. Eliot, East Coker

It is a bit of an odd thing for Presbyterians to observe Ash Wednesday.  In fact, if you expand your historical perspective on Christianity to include more than about the last 50 years, you might notice that it's downright out of order.  Most people didn't really grow up with it, and it has had to be re-introduced into the yearly patterns of life.  On this Ash Wednesday, I'm going to engage in a bit of speculation as to why it's been making a comeback in many "reformed" churches, and why that's a good thing.

First, you probably need to know why it was dropped in the first place, and the simple answer is: the Reformation.  The birth pangs of protestant forms of faith involved, to varying extents a repudiation of all things Roman Catholic.  Sometimes protestants rejected an idea just because the Catholics really liked it, and many of the celebrations and disciplines of Lent fell into this category: Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, not eating meat on Friday, and so on.  We came up with good theological explanations for why we rejected these things, but it's a little suspicious which came first the rejection or the rationale.

For a long time after the divorce, the estranged members of the Body of Christ tended to persecute one another, and the animosity grew, because we had largely forgotten how serious Jesus was about forgiveness and reconciliation, and because, frankly, there was turf to be fought over.  Lutherans and those in the Anglican Stream, sort of wanted to hold on to the trappings of Catholicism while getting to make their own calls about how they behaved and how they divided up the loot, so they held on to the Ashes, and there was no shortage of bluster and claims to the superiority of one practice over another.

It took every bit of five centuries for the church to start to collapse back in on itself enough so that we realized that there is more that holds us together than divides us.  Though I'm sure you will still find some reformed curmudgeons who go on and on about Popish nonsense and grace alone.  But for me, and for many like me, the old rituals began to seem, well, more necessary.  Don't get me wrong, Ash Wednesday is still not a yuge (go Bernie!) deal in the Presbyterian Church, I will have a handful of people come listen to me try to explain the mystery of how contemplating our own mortality actually is a good and necessary thing to do.

And that mystery is at the heart of why the Ashes are making a comeback.  We live in a world that denies death and despises the maturation of life, at least partially because we fear death.  Growing old is unpleasant; our bodies break down more frequently, in some cases our minds do as well.  The passage of time brings both joy and sorrow, as Eliot said, "the pattern more complicated of dead and living."

I sense this complication as I prepare to confront this mystery.  This year, I found a Mennonite liturgy, which I shamelessly purloined for working pieces, including Eliot's East Coker. I have to reach outside of my own tradition and heritage for meaningful Ash Wednesday things, because everything in my own is essentially pirated from the Episcopalians or Lutherans anyway.

But this, in and of itself is a good move to have to make.  I can't begin to estimate how much value the practice of Pilgrimage has been to me, and that was something the Reformers dismissed as papist superstition, if not outright sorcery as well.  But, as I have mentioned before, one of my favorite phrases out of my own tradition is the Latin: Reformata, semper reformanda, Reformed, always being reformed.  Just as the Reformers reached back to the Patristic age of Augustine to "undo" the excesses of medieval Catholicism, maybe we now reach back to the heart of some of those practices that were once denounced.  Maybe we reach outside of our own backyard to find some new treasures.

Home is where we start from, but not where we stay.  We come from ashes, we live, we love, we worship, we complicate our patterns, and we are simplified and return home.

The repetition of rituals and yearly patterns helps us to note how we are changing, it gives us a background against which to move.  It helps us see where we have come from and note the distance we have traveled.

That little smudge on the forehead can do an awful lot.