I sort of forgot that it was Ash Wednesday. This is bad, because I’m a minister, and it’s literally my job to remember these things. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, which is our forty journey to Easter. This year, it seemed, I was a little late getting off the blocks.
I clocked the sacred day when I noticed one of the dads at school drop-off had a grey smudge on his forehead. He’d obviously been to church that morning, and had the ashes applied. He was also wearing a clergy collar, like me. I gave a friendly I’m-a-minister-too wave across the playground.
I had not been to church that morning. Instead, I had been busy throwing fruit and sandwiches into a Hot Wheels lunchbox, and coaxing my 5 year old to get dressed, and convincing him of the need for teeth-brushing. Sometimes my son comes up with elaborate stalling-techniques, especially when it’s a day when he knows he will go to the other parent’s home after school. He’s anxious, and wants to squeeze in a few extra moments with the parent he’s currently with – and the result is that at 8.35am I’m assisting with a complex craft project that involves drilling a keyring into a block of wood.
We miraculously reached school by 8.53, and were set to be on track, until he uttered the fateful words, “Obstacle course!” I groaned as I watched him dash across the playground and up a ladder, across monkey-bars and down a slide, before climbing across a wall of criss-crossed chains, Spider Man style.
“Ok, are you done?”
“Not yet!”
He tip-toed across the wooden perimeter that encased the tan-bark, before hopping onto a tree stump. Then he leapt into the garden, and began to scale a small tree.
“Not the tree!” I yelled.
“It’s part of the obstacle course!” he yelled back.
The pressure was starting to build in my belly. “Get down and go to class!” I bellowed.
“No!”
I decided, against my better judgement, to apply force, and began to pull him away from the tree.
“Stop!!” he screamed.
He looked at me angrily from the ground, face red and tears in his eyes.
“Now I have to start again!”
At 9.07, the prep teacher found me slumped amongst the backpacks and hats, while my son was climbing like a crab across a length of metal-strung fence.
“Are you ok?” she wanted to know.
I nodded in my son’s direction. “Just frustrated.”
And ashamed, I added, in my head. I wished that I was the picture of maternal patience, but that day the world had witnessed me as something else: a frazzled, red-faced mum, with a scooter in one hand and a Hot Wheels backpack in the other, muttering swear words under her breath as she chased her son across the yard. I would have taken off my clerical collar, but the world had already seen it.
So it is the beginning of Lent – the season that many Christians begin by having ash smudged onto their foreheads. I keep a little bowl of ash in my office, and I did end up pulling it out that night, to press into the foreheads of our Church Council members. We wondered, together, about the significance of ash. To me, it’s about humility. ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ are the words we say at a funeral. We come from dust, and we return to dust. It is good, every now and then, to remember that.
Because we often spend our lives trying to prove to the world, and ourselves, that we are much more than dust. We are successful, we have it together, we are going someplace. There is tremendous pressure to be much, much more than dust.
But in the end, we are earthlings. Made from the stuff of the earth, and with all of the dirt and the mess that comes with that. It is good, every now and then, to remember that. And maybe even a bit liberating.
The forty days of Lent are about reminding ourselves of our earthiness. But it doesn’t stop there, because Christians also believe that it is only in our humble, earthy state that the lifeforce of God can begin to pulse through us. Like God breathing breath into the first earthling, we hope that our dusty forms can be animated by God as well.
I didn’t wear dust on my face that Ash Wednesday morning. And yet, dust I was. Angry, frazzled, frustrated dust, no airs and graces, just raw vulnerable me, for the world to see. I felt shame, and yet, I wonder if this was exactly the way that I needed to start Lent. By remembering that I am dust…and with the hope that Life might be breathed therein.
Words by Rev Andreana
Image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko, Unsplash
Comments