Looking at Ashes from Both Sides Now
Following right on the heels of Fat Tuesday as usual, another Ash Wednesday has come and gone. Learning still (and no doubt in perpetuity) about the rhythms of the Christian calendar, I have come to the conclusion that this is a not only a mysterious but also a downright weird time of year, and getting weirder too. The fact that life and death are more mixed up than usual is a big part of it, but there’s also a distinct new thrust to transform what was formerly a lean and worried kind of season into something almost, well, rich and plentiful.
I almost didn’t go to the school’s service last week to mark the beginning of Lent. Not being Catholic, I honestly didn’t feel the need to attend and wasn’t fully required either; but in my kind of work generally it’s a good idea to be part of any all-school assembly. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be changed by the mass, just content to be near all of these teenagers who sat quietly and respectfully in the pews, the same pews where, through the past century and a half, so many waves of immigrants preceded them.
As it turned out, though, my colleague’s sermon really took hold in the craggy spaces of my soul. Despite the subdued nature of the service, with no music and a palpable feeling of death’s nearness, the priest encouraged the students in such a calm and reassuring—even upbeat—way to consider key elements of their actions at school, at home with their families, and in their communities. He said essentially, “You make choices about how to act every day, in every sphere, and you can be in charge of making them thoughtfully.”
Ashes didn’t figure prominently in his homily, but somehow the mention of them at all brought forth in me a cascade of memories of my own two parents. Perhaps because I was last “with” them when my brothers and I were spreading their ashes under the old clothesline and the gnarly group of peach trees at our home, I was suddenly struck by a strange fact. I now saw my parents in a kind of continuum: they were still the two individuals who had always been there for me, and who had also lived many vigorous years before I arrived, and they were also the dusty remains of those people. Understood in this way, ashes lost their gloom. Indeed, they took me right back to the image of my smiling mother, carrying her laundry basket.
I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, graduating from high school there exactly one half century after F. Scott’s Fitzgerald classic, The Great Gatsby, was published in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. In this book, you’d be hard pressed to find any positive slant for the notorious mounds of “ashes” — most likely representing an actual huge garbage dump at the time – somewhere in Queens. Here’s the opening of Chapter Two:
About half way between West Egg and New York, the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
The place is bleak, but the fact that the ashes “grow” gives it a certain kind of macabre life, too. The “already crumbling” men here, and presumably the women too, are trapped, with no chance of striving towards any green light on a dock. At least in this book, only a guy who lives in a house like this, a safe distance away from reminders that we are all dust, has access to those sweeping vistas and dreams.
As it happened, during the first week of Lent, my husband was involved with ashes at home as well as at work, and there was nothing grotesque about either kind. With still just enough snow on the ground to enable him to burn a big brush pile in our back field without a town permit, time was of the essence. One cold night, I watched the glow of the fire from the kitchen window. Sparks flew skyward, and the scene was wild and wonderful. When I went down to inspect the remains a day or so later, I was amazed at how little was left; he must have done something with those ashes; I will remember to ask.
Another brush pile, right by the pond, now awaits its own fate. With more snow likely soon, it gets a kind of reprieve for a few days, looking like a Lenten sculpture or some kind of funeral pyre. Whenever we’re gathering and disposing of already fallen material, it feels as if we’re fully in harmony with Nature, even when we’re encountering death.
The thing is, though, from what I can tell, Lent is moving farther away from anything resembling death and becoming much more about what makes a fully meaningful and yes, even rich, life. At my school computer last week, I started receiving emails inviting me to view a series of videos called “Best Lent Ever!” During my years as a clergy spouse, I haven’t been accustomed to seeing exclamation marks punctuating this time of year, or to hearing people wish each other a wonderful Lent, but hey–everything is shifting, so why not this? The sponsoring organization for the videos is called “Dynamic Catholic” so there’s nothing grey or withdrawn about this new movement, if that’s what it is.
There are lots of reasons to be grateful for everyday ashes. This winter, I’ve been glad for our wood stove and for the person who generally tends it. In that we’re alive and so are our children, able to feel the blustery winds of March, it’s a time of plenty.