Repost - The Slow Way: Dust and Water, a Reflection on Ash Wednesday

On Ash Wednesday we remember together that we all need a story of healing, redemption, and wholeness, no matter our current circumstances. We need to be rescued from the ache of this world.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Friends, yesterday we learned that Chris’s last living grandparent, Grama Sue, passed away. I wasn’t able to get a new Slow Way Letter written, and decided that this piece from last year was a fitting response to her loss, and our journey through the beginning of Lent. Even if you remember it from last year, I hope you’ll find a nugget of wisdom to carry with you into this season.

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This past week when a friend mentioned watching the series “Masters of the Air,” I told the story of my Pawpaw, now 12 years gone, who was a gunner on a B-17 in WWII. He was shot down over Poland, captured as a POW, survived over a year in the hands of the Nazis, and eventually returned home to my grandmother.

I’d forgotten that this story I used to tell so often when Pawpaw was alive has become even more rare as most of the folks of his generation are gone. My friend was amazed. I shared how my grandfather took me to air shows in the 80s, how we climbed inside the B-17 on the tarmac. He showed me where he once sat in the back of the plane and where he escaped via parachute after he was shot in the arm and the plane exploded. And how, as he used to tell the story, he realized he was going to land on a tree in the middle of a farm: “Naturally,” he always told it, “I crossed my legs.”

He was the best storyteller, but he never told this particular story of his life until middle age, when my dad was in late high school or college. By the time I came around and he was my after-school babysitter, he was telling it to groups in various places, representing former POWs or Purple Hearts. I mostly knew him as the man in my life who made me grilled cheese on his homemade bread, who I watched in his workshop, who sketched pictures or worked crosswords while I watched TV.

As I told my friend this story, Chris who was sitting beside us, chimed in: “Micha got her sweetness straight from Pawpaw.” I was surprised and delighted. Really? And then I cried. I haven’t cried for him in years. I’ve used all my tears for my dad. Brooksie was a baby when Pawpaw died and now he is almost a teenager. A lifetime. My grandfather is gone and his little boy, my dad, is gone too. The best men, the ones who taught me that I had value and strength and creativity to offer the world.

I’ve always liked Ash Wednesday. I like it because it doesn’t shy away from the reality of life—that we carry the truth of death with us throughout our lives. Sometimes we notice the ache of death that lives among us, and sometimes we are lucky enough to be distracted by all the life, all the joy. I’m learning, though, as I move further into this season of middle age, that I will carry more and more people I love in my body as an ache. My dad, all my grandparents, the friends I’ve lost. The list will grow. What do we do about death?

The seasons of the Christian calendar invite us to every experience of life, and we need this as humans. We need moments of collective celebration, even if our individual circumstances aren’t necessarily joyful. It’s a sacred act to practice joy together. In the same way we need moments grieving and noticing the pain of this world together, whether or not we are currently living a season of grief. That’s why Ash Wednesday and Lent exist for us in the six weeks that lead to the celebration of Easter, so we remember together that we all need a story of healing, redemption, and wholeness, no matter our current circumstances. We need to be rescued from the ache that manifests in this world.

And to begin that journey of searching for transformation, we need a day—Ash Wednesday—to stare death in the eyes, to remember that it will come for each of us, as it has for all those who received the ashes before us. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”

Ash Wednesday sounds morbid to some, but it exists to tell us the truth, to ask us to come close to the reality of this life: we are always transforming, growing toward wisdom. And it will end. But I love that in the Christian tradition death is understood as a both/and. It is a result of brokenness in the world and it is also a threshold, a transition to fullness of life. As the Apostle Paul wrote, death is still with us, but through Jesus it has lost its sting.

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh believed that the truth of death lives in the cloud. “The cloud does not come from nothing,” he taught. “There has only been a change in form. If you look deeply into the rain, you can see the cloud.” The lovely book Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most explains Nhat Hanh’s thinking this way: “the coming and going of the cloud is a continuous process of change. Nothing comes to be or ceases to be. There is only a series of shifting ‘manifestations’...like the waves on an ocean.” Dust before and dust after. Water before and water after. “Everything is always shifting, changing, giving rise to whatever is next,” the authors Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnaly-Linz write. Or as Nhat Hanh said, “instead of birth and death, there is only continually transformation.”

I used to love Ash Wednesday because it reminded me that I would one day die, and even as that death felt far away, I knew it was something a wise person ought to remember. The older I get, the more that death feels close to me. The people who formed me are the ones who are leaving me. The people I’m forming are the ones who will carry me to the end. Transformation. Water evaporating, forming clouds, turning to rain. I’m no expert on middle age, but here in my mid-forties I’m beginning to see this reality more clearly.

I believe deeply–and more fully—in the world “further up and further in” as CS Lewis described the promised life beyond this one that Jesus came to invite us into. I whispered my dad off to that to that place, and I plan to whisper as many people I love there as possible. And still, we cannot hold hope for a future fullness of life without carrying the ashes, accepting that this particular harsh and tender life we’re in right now will end for each of us.

Someday, I hope, I will be missed twelve years after my death, by a middle aged granddaughter who loved me, who I faithfully cared for, taught, told my stories to. I want to be an ache she carries.

And that’s what we hold on Ash Wednesday. We hold the aches: the ones we carry, the ones we will carry, the ache the ones we love will hold when we’re gone. In Lent we get to work through that ache, come to hold it and let us be transformed by it, and practice the hope of believing in life beyond the ache. But this Wednesday, as we enter into our solemn places of worship and are told to remember our death, I’ll pray we hear a voice behind us whispering: this is the way to the good life, straight through the pain. Further up, further in.

A Slow Practice

As you begin this Lenten season, can you give yourself fifteen minutes to journal?

Here are the questions I want you to consider:

1. Do I connect with Nhat Hanh’s image of the water cycle when thinking about death? Does it ring true to me? Does it comfort me, disturb me, inspire me?

2. What are the aches of death you carry with you? Name the ones you’ve lost, the ones you ache for.

3. As you consider today that eventually you will also be an ache that someone else carries with them, what comes to mind? What longing can you tap into that expresses what you want your presence to be for the people you love right now?

After your journaling, feel free to pray something like this:

Holy One who made us and who transforms us all the way to our hopeful end, teach me to see your presence in every ache of this life. Amen.