The Slow Way: Dust and Water, a Reflection on Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday exists to tell us the truth, to help us practice holding the ache: the ones we carry, the ones we will carry, the ache the ones we love will hold when we’re gone.
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
This week our slow practice invites you to attend any Ash Wednesday service you can find. If you’re not in a church that offers an Ash Wednesday service, find one! Most Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist churches offer Ash Wednesday services. This is a great service to pop into, especially for us introverts because you’re usually not forced to talk to people! It’s solemn enough that everyone stays silent, which means it’s easier to hide.
Often there are services throughout the day. One year—during peak-Covid—my family even found a drive-through Ash Wednesday experience! This year, Ash Wednesday and Valentines Day coexist. (Which is just too good of a mash-up.) So it may be more difficult to make time for the weight and substance of the day. Part of your spiritual practice this week is to plan ahead, to make time for it.
I also encourage you to spend a little time ahead of the service checking in with your soul. Can you give yourself fifteen minutes ahead of the service to journal? Maybe you can get there early, or carve out time in the beginning of your day or the night before for a little reflection.
Here are the questions I want you to consider:
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?
What are the aches of death you carry with you? Name the ones you’ve lost, the ones you ache for.
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 you write down these answers, take your journal with you to the service. If you have a moment in the service, open it up to remind yourself of these things. As the ashes are placed on your forehead practice being in the moment, aware of the truth of your fragility and the gift of it as well.
After your journaling or during the Ash Wednesday service, 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.
A Note:
Just a reminder about the zoom soul-care workshop “Embracing Our Limits, Discovering Our Wholeness,” which I’ll be leading February 24 for my paid subscribers in preparation for the release of Blessed Are the Rest of Us this April. We have thirteen people signed up and I’m thrilled that I’ll get to spend a Saturday morning with all of you! (If you’re signed up you should be hearing from me with more details next week.)
If you’re interested in being part this workshop along with the Blessed Are the Rest of Us book club I’ll be hosting this spring, consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month. I offer The Slow Way letter free every week, so this is a way of supporting my work!
Also, you can preorder the book right now at Baker Book House, where it’s 40% off the price of other booksellers. The first 200 preorders over there will receive a signed copy and a fun little gift from me!
Woah. This. “instead of birth and death, there is only continually transformation.”
My mother died when I was three years old. All my life, people told me how sweet, caring and gentle she was. Now I believe how sweet, caring and gentle she IS.
When my son was 6 yrs old he used to lie in his bed and cry because he missed my Mother---the grandmother he never met. He would old a tiny framed black and white picture of her, with her bee hive hair, and tell me he wanted to meet her. It was one of the most profound things I have seen. A little boy missing and longing to meet a grandmother he had never met.
Recently, a woman asked me if I talked to my deceased Mother. I was shocked. I said, "I do not talk to her, but I do think of her." She said, "she is always with you, especialy at night." I have been thinking of this. And have begun speaking to my Mother Mary, in the night. A few nights ago, I woke and whether it was a dream or a reality, I felt her presence, standing beside my bed.
Pershaps my Mother has transformed into a loving presence, that is still with me?