There’s this silly graphic making the rounds on social media these days. Maybe mostly on nerdy clergy Facebook pages, but perhaps you’ve seen it too. It’s a series of crosses that might be made on people’s foreheads. There’s the clean, crisp one called “first in line,” and the very pale one called “add toner.” There are also some non-standard shapes like the indistinct smudge called “the blob,” and my personal favorite, the sooty checkmark called “been there, done that.”
That would be the story of my day. Which began with ashes at 8:00 am outside the Home Depot in Richmond, where the Episcopal Church that sponsored me for ordination—La Santisima Trinidad—has a longstanding ministry with the day laborers. This is a ministry that rends my heart, which is no bad thing at Lent. For these lonely men, who are often forced by economic necessity to be separated from their families for years at a time, the imposition of ashes may be the only gentle touch they receive all year.
Then at noon I found myself amidst the huge altar party imposing ashes at Grace Cathedral. Which means this is the third time today that I’ve heard “Beware of practicing your piety before others…” after I’ve been putting on public signs of piety all day.
Ash Wednesday is one of the few times when we north American Christians make our ritual practices public. So to the extent that piety involves religious ritual, perhaps when we wear the cross of ashes on our foreheads we are indeed practicing our piety before others. In which case we’d better repent immediately. Which is a time-honored Lenten practice in and of itself, so we would be observing the season regardless.
Or maybe there’s something else going on with this ancient symbol of our earthy nature, and its promise that all fire—including the fire of our own metabolic processes—will ultimately be extinguished. This morning when I touched Jorge on the forehead, reminding him that he was dust and would return to dust, his hands and face already bore so much urban grime that the ashes seemed a bit redundant. And at that moment I realized that I was not telling him something he didn’t already know, or giving him something he didn’t already have. Jorge was on intimate terms with dirt and mortality: I was the one who needed the reminder.
Ashes may be a symbol of piety, but they are also quite literally dirt. Carbon residue that—under any other circumstances—we’d go out of our way to remove from our bodies. And mostly, you and I can do so in ways that Jorge cannot. We have easy access to clean water and wipes and—more broadly speaking— ways to erase the mess and mortality of our human existence from public view.
But Lent does not afford us that luxury. In order to practice the spiritual discipline of repentance we first have to tell the truth about our need for God’s mercy. To return to the Lord, we have to acknowledge that we have actually turned away. Which, I can assure you, we all have. But I know that—for myself—the same instinct that makes me want to present a clean face in public also makes me want to ignore or cover up the many ways in which I have been less than faithful to God. Ways in which I have left the limitless grace of God on the table because I didn’t want to confront the personal messiness that actually made me need it.
Our traditional Lenten disciplines—prayer, fasting and almsgiving—can be a kind of spiritual mirror, reflecting back our messiness and mortality, as well as our beauty and eternal beloved-ness. I hope you give some of them a try. If, for example, you take advantage of the Lenten season to pray more—for which we have some take-home resources to help you—there are two possibilities. You may find that it’s an experience of joyful return to the Lord, or you may find it is an experience of frustration in which you learn to trust God’s grace over your own efforts. If you fast, which might be consuming less food or less media or less busy-ness, you might encounter another vulnerability in your deeper hunger for God.
For the past several years, I’ve been wrestling with the Lenten discipline of almsgiving, which is traditionally charity toward the poor. I really dislike the side of myself that would judge panhandlers and I’d like to be able to give with unconditional love. So I chose a Lenten practice of giving money to everyone who asked, with no questions. And not to give small change either; my plan was to give no less than $5 to any one person. In other words, to give away enough to really notice what I was giving up. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll calls this practice of charity the “Untied Way,” in contrast to the United Way.
The first year I did this, I was so proud of myself when I left my local bank branch with 160 $5 bills burning a hole in my pocket. I planned to give $20 a day. But I actually failed rather miserably at the task. Not because people in my neighborhood don’t need money, but because—as I discovered—I spent too much time in my car. I was speeding past the people who might have asked me for money. So the second year, I had to add the discipline of walking more in the places where poor people are present. But that just showed me that I needed to learn their names. Each year as I’ve returned to this discipline, I’ve stumbled and had to adjust my plans in ways that went beyond just the intention to give money. And in the process, I have been changed.
This Lent, like last year, we’ll again be telling personal stories at St. Stephen’s. And even though the various speakers we’ll be hearing from on Wednesdays and Sundays will be talking about how we live into the promises of our baptism, I assure that they won’t be stories about practicing piety before others. Rather, they will be—like mine—stories of good intentions and partial failure. Of trying our best for God and still ending up with our faces smudged, metaphorically speaking.
Which makes them stories of the grace of God, rendering our imperfect efforts holy. So maybe it’s really too simplistic to think of ashes as either signs of piety or as signs of sin and mortality. Perhaps they are something more like God’s graffiti, spray painting the truth that we are beloved messes right over the parts of ourselves that we might want to clean up. Because there’s something sacred that happens at the boundary where honestly about our human condition meets God’s unconditional love. That’s where can hear good news because we have honestly lamented the bad, and where we can rejoice in resurrection because we have truly faced death.
On Ash Wednesday, when our shiny faces meet God’s sacred grime, the truth is imprinted on our very bodies. Yes, we have been there and done that, God knows: every discipline we’ve tried, every imperfection and failure we’ve had to confront, every unresolved doubt and grief we wrestle with. As we enter into this holy season, let me suggest that these ashes are a sign not so much of practicing our piety before people, but rather of practicing our vulnerability before people. And, God willing, may we continue to do so every Lent, until ash and eternity meet, and we realize that they are one.
