The Imposition of Ashes
In the before times, Ash Wednesday always made me feel holy. When I was a bored, Catholic child, I didn’t understand why I ought to be ceremonially soiled in a dim cathedral on a weeknight, but as an increasingly disillusioned evangelical adult on the way to agnosticism, it was the only holy day that made any sense to me. “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
At Grace Community Church, where I quietly hid my skepticism and worry in manic journal entries years before lexapro and an OCD diagnosis, I sat on carpeted steps in the candlelit youth building, listening to hymns about death sung over an acoustic guitar. It is one of my most positive memories from church, because no one was pretending that anguish didn’t exist.
Ash Wednesday is the emo-as-hell beginning of Lent, a period of fasting and lament in the Christian church calendar. Folks with varying levels of practice across a wide spectrum of denominations may participate by giving up a favorite vice for 40 days, but the reformed theology bros in my small group (and me, a moderately depressed, 20-something youth group leader sincerely looking for existential meaning in the suburbs of Columbia, Maryland) spent this time working through devotionals, meditating on mortality. The symbol of an ashen cross—last year’s Palm Sunday remains singed, saved, and smeared as a fragrant, oily paste onto reverent foreheads—acknowledges the need for repentance and the reality of death. It embodies the rhythm of the holy calendar, and Christian theology. It is death to self and death undone and dying into life again. ”For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
It was always, to me, very “convicting,” a word meaning “hurts in a good way” in evangelical shorthand. In a summary graphic I created for a 2016 Bible study presentation, I wrote, “Lent is intended to refocus us on the glory of Christ and Easter in a deep and troubling way,” which about sums up the whole ordeal. The 40 days and nights leading up to Easter (the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion) remind Christians that Jesus’s death is the necessary atonement for their sin. We are bad enough that God had to die, which should sicken you, because you’re loved. Happy Easter.
Very smart, religious people have excellent ways of explaining how and why “God so loved the world that he sent his only son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life,” but plenty of regular folks like me have a hard time accepting the rules and “sense” of substitutionary atonement. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” You are loved, you are loathed, you are whole, you are broken. Everyone is invited, except the ones that aren’t. Happy Easter.
At the time of my most pious misery, Lent offered two comforts: lament and companionship with Jesus as one who suffered. Unfortunately, lament—crying to God in honest anguish—was ultimately sold as a release to feel better but alter nothing about the divine plan we had no control over. As for the other, anyone who has suffered in proximity to well-meaning religious folks has likely heard some flavor of “everything happens for a reason,” which is not very “Jesus wept” of them.
It’s difficult to have loved and feared the experience of being a Christian so equally for so many crucial and formative years. How does one reconcile lessons like, “do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” with “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” or “God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying nor pain”?
Somewhere, in a box, there is a journal with prayers inside. In a youth building, on the steps, among the hymns, I felt known, seen, and reached, specifically and individually, by loving, omnipotent sentience. I felt that my pain was meaningful, and my hurt was allowed, and I went home with a black smudge on my forehead. I went home glad that I chose this story to believe. Now, I feel like a once hot coal, cooled to ash. I have so little in common with my memories of this season. I don’t always feel better off, just older and with less to anguish. I never trusted I had reason to relax, always doubting I was repentant enough, diligent enough, earnest enough, to be real, and was warned that the devil makes false believers feel sure of themselves. If that’s true, maybe it’s God who let me off the hook. More likely, it’s therapy and medication. I get nervous when young, vibrant, Bible-wielding college students fill my coffee shop with the holy spirit. I get nervous that they have it right, and I will be tossed into a lake of fire. Then they don’t tip, and I think of how much Jesus cared for poor people, sex workers, and the exact sort of people I love. Then I feel okay.
In the Lenten devotional I completed in 2016, the author described the difference between “playing” Christianity and truly participating. He argued that one could go through the outward expression of Lent and still “functionally exclude [Jesus] from our lives.” It’s easier to look the part than live it. If you give a convincing enough performance, nosy church folk leave you alone. In my opinion, there are ways to play at doubt, too. It’s easier to say, “fuck Christians” than admit you miss meeting in basements and singing songs about death, even when the words don’t mean what they used to.
I always found the idea of resurrection to be the most compelling part of Christianity. Not the atonement piece, but the restoration. The undoing of death. I liked believing that nothing was too far from Goodness, there was always another chance, that “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe in hell, and I don’t know what to do about history’s question, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, but between you and me, I still like the idea that the green branches welcoming salvation to town on a donkey become the harbinger of grief’s most holy season, and that at the end of that darkness, three women have good news. Happy Easter.