While my own Christian community was enacting ancient rituals of mortality, I was in another state attending to a hospitalized parent, and having conversations about his end of life wishes. No worries: dad is fine right now. But there’s nothing quite like brain surgery to remind a person of the finitude of human existence. So I suppose it would have been perfectly legitimate to skip the public expression of Ash Wednesday this year, because I was living in the midst of the message that, yes, we all return to dust. Reality imitates symbol.
But more ritual is always better IMHO. And it’s never a bad thing to see how my colleagues do it, so I BART and bussed myself to Grace Cathedral for the midday Eucharist and imposition of ashes. Full disclosure: this is the site of my former workplace and I also hoped to see old friends. In that I was not disappointed. Bishop Marc Andrus preached a beautiful sermon about a spiritual mentor’s radically generous act of gift-giving. At first hearing, not the obvious metaphor for a holy day devoted to self-denial, as the Book of Common Prayer phrases it.
But it was Sheila Andrus who brought the Lenten lesson to life for me when she confessed that she was present for the events preached, but had been unable to accept the offered gift. Receiving a gift is, in itself, a relinquishment of the illusion of reciprocal exchange. And I am conscious that all of it—our first breath as well as our last, and all the made-of-and-returning-to-dust matter we encounter in between—is gift. None of our products or labor reciprocate the primal present that is life itself. I’m #LentINGo of false equivalency.
