As a seminarian, blogging about my internship experience, I feel like an Ash Wednesday blog post is rather obligatory. I'll include my sermon in a different post, but here are some thoughts about my first Ash Wednesday from the other side of things.
I've grown up in the ELCA at a highly liturgical congregation, which means that I've participated in nearly ALL of the services that we could possibly have at a congregation: all of Holy Week, mid-week Lenten services, pet blessings, Ascension Day, etc. If there's a reason to have worship, I've been there.
I've always loved Ash Wednesday. It's one day a year where I am reminded of how big God is. In high school, I remember my mom saying that some people were critical of parents who brought their child to receive ashes. I felt this way then, but now that I have the seminarian language for it, I would say that all ages of people are welcome in the sanctuary for any reason and at any time. If we only give Eucharist to adults who understand it, then none of us will receive communion. No, seriously. Yes, as a candidate for ordination in the ELCA, I understand the concepts of it, but how God appears in those elements and what the depth and breadth of God's love looks like is out of my grasp. I feel the same way about ashes. Regardless of what kids "know" about the ashes, if they feel like receiving a cross on their forehead to remind them of who they are and whose they are, then I say go for it. We mark the foreheads of children as a blessing during Eucharist, so why not add ashes to that?
This was the first year that I've been on the other side of placing these ashes on foreheads though. Prior to the services that I participated in, I knew that the ashes had to be prepared. When I worked as the Assistant to the Dean of the Chapel last year, I participated in the service to burn last year's palms into ashes. This year, it was up to my supervisor and I to burn the palms into ashes, with no community around to witness it. She had never done it and honestly, other than watching the seasoned liturgical professionals do it, I had never done it. When I don't know how to do something, my first step, as a Generation Yer, was to Google it.
I chuckled to myself as I read this article. Two and a half years into mastering the divine and I'm on eHow to figure out how to make ashes. I also emailed my friend Dan, the cantor at LSTC, to ask for a service to burn the ashes; he provided an awesome one! I also emailed my friend Kevin, a current pastor, to ask his opinion on the proper way to add the olive oil into ashes, since this article didn't explain. I knew through chapel work that it was easier to burn the ashes if you cut them into smaller pieces, so out came the scissors.
As I cut the dry, dusty palms into a small, metal can, one of the community members asked me what Ash Wednesday meant. I love these awkward, challenging moments for me here on internship. In every community, we develop common language and common experience. I take for granted that I grew up in a congregation that was full of people who either knew what Ash Wednesday meant to them or were too afraid to ask. Here, in a community where Christianity is still associated with the white Colonizers, I can't assume that people know the traditions or practices of the Church.
After explaining my understanding of Ash Wednesday (check my sermon for more thoughts), I took my materials outside and began to burn the ashes.
There was something humbling about taking the palms and actually turning them into the ashes. I've only ever been privy to seeing the ashes in their fine, perfect powder, without remember where they came from. I will admit that my ashes were not the fine, perfect powder that I remember of my childhood, but I was glad for this. When I got to put my fingers into those ashes, chunky and messy, and smear the cross on the foreheads of toddlers to people in their eighties, I was reminded that we are messy. We are incapable of being fine and perfect, but God loves us anyway. That's the essence of Ash Wednesday to me.
I was further reminded of the awesomeness of God's love when we held our children's service that night. I had preached and led worship at St. John's Episcopal for a noontime service, but Karen led the children's service. I helped put ashes on the kids who wanted them. For most of the kids, this was more about the excitement of something different, rather than a somber reflection on their mortality. Many smudged theirs or rubbed the crosses completely off. One boy was distressed that he had wiped his cross off by accident. I didn't want to give him a new cross, since we could end up with 40 kids wanting new crosses. To be clear, I'm happy that it mattered to them; I didn't want to spend hours playing the wipe-on/wipe-off game. This boy was upset later in the service and refused to come upstairs to eat dinner. I went down to check on him and he was crying. He wouldn't tell me what the matter was, but eventually agreed that he'd like to receive new ashes. I gave him the privilege of putting ashes on my forehead, since my noon-time ashes had washed off when I was at the gym in the afternoon. He was thrilled. There was something sacred in this moment, crouched on the floor, marking the cross on the forehead of a child with tears still streaming down his face. There was something incredibly humbling about receiving ashes from this child. I remembered that I was dust in a way that I don't think I've ever felt and it was awesome.
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