“Remember I am made of clay and you will return me to dust” (Job 10.9).
Since November, I have built a fire nearly every night much to the delight of Leanne and the cats. So, once a week, I need to bring in the pail and shovel out the ash beneath the grate.
Every shovelful I empty into the pail is a reminder of a night that has passed. There are weekday nights when I build up the wood and light the fire before playing with the kittens and then sitting to read as they soak up the warmth. There’s the weekend fires Leanne and I sit before talking about our week, our work, our plans. Each night we close the doors on its dying embers, and head into darkness and sleep.
The tradition of the Christian Church has been to take and burn the palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday procession to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. Our skin is then marked by a reminder of how time passes. Even as we find our lips still damp with yesterday’s praise.
For many of us, we will not be marked by physical ashes this year. This pandemic requires we forego this familiar ritual where we are reminded that we are dust. And there is loss, as there has been for so many months, of one more part of our “before” lives.
Maybe this is an opportunity to look at what other symbols we can find of our mortality and how quickly our days pass. Perhaps it’s in the book lying atop the others on the shelf, the one you meant to find a place for when you set it down a year or more ago. Or it could be the chipped paint on the wall, the mark on the ceiling from the leak last spring you’ve yet to paint. It might even be the bag of soil for the flowerbed that is beginning to disintegrate from seasons lying in the sun.
More than ashes, these icons can remind us how quickly time passes and how brief are our days. And they call us to some sort of fast—an act of replacing something with something else. They call us to fast from the thoughts and actions that take us away from the reminders of what it means to have something so rare and valuable as life. They tell us that our days are like grass, that we are made of earth and stones and the remnants of last autumn’s crushed leaves.
And we are called, again, to shout with joy because tomorrow this day will have burned away to ash, just like all those before. But, right now, it is a new fire, inviting us to feel its warmth, taste its smoke, hear its crackling, and smell the dry and seasoned wood. It, too, will be gone too fast, and we will close its doors, walk into darkness, and sleep.
And, if there is grace, we will wake to find its song of joy still damp upon our lips.
Holy Fire, every moment is fragile, precious, and rare. They exist and then are no more than ash. In these Lenten days, help us see the beauty all around us, to taste and see that all things have been made good; so, we can cherish every one of our days and the ones with which we share them. Journey with us into and through the dark days that will close this season; so, we might wake with joy on our lips.