Today is Ash Wednesday, a day of atonement in the Christian tradition and a stopwatch that begins the forty-day countdown toward Easter. For years as a parish priest, I imposed hundreds of ashen crosses onto the foreheads of those coming forward to bear the visceral reminder that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Today, as I sit at my campsite reciting the prayer book liturgy to myself, it’s hard to feel penitent. There’s a delightful breeze blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico. Palm fronds are swaying and birds are chirping. The sky is blue and inviting. I’m struggling to feel wretched.
That said, I’m struck by the bubble of snowbird retirement bliss I’m living in this moment. Sin is still within me and it remains rampant in the world. Like ash, the residue of sin sticks to everything. I find my mind drifting back to Baltimore, to the impoverished neighborhoods where I have led too many prayer walks to places where too many people, mostly young Black men and boys, have died from gun violence. This is where the ashes of sin burn in my heart this day.
My mind also takes me back to an Ash Wednesday almost 20 years ago, when I was in Israel on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a group of clergy from many denominational backgrounds. On this particular day (but not because it was Ash Wednesday), we were scheduled to tour Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. One of the most powerful spaces in the museum is the Hall of Remembrance, dedicated to the millions who died in the 22 concentration camps. Ashes from some of the victims were recovered from some of those camps and interred here in this round room with walls of basalt from the Dead Sea and centered by an eternal flame burning hot with sorrow.
The juxtaposition and irony of being in a room built to hold human ashes on the Christian holy day called Ash Wednesday was jarring. I will forever think of that tour and that room when Ash Wednesday rolls around each year. It will forever remind me of the power of sin, multiplied and magnified by hatred to spawn an unimaginable density of massacre.
Back in the camping chair in Florida in February, feeling the breeze, I am still hard pressed to think of my own sins, of what I need to personally repent of. But then I recall that I am part of a human family that has done this massive evil. Other evils come to mind, those of past and present, ones that I know will continue (like senseless gun violence). This is my sin, to be a part of this society, this species, to be a contributor by omission of action if nothing else. I create and contribute part of the ash residue just like everyone else.
Back at the hotel in Jerusalem that evening years ago, I was longing for an Ash Wednesday service. I needed to process my experience at Yad Vashem. Our tour guide had arranged for a couple of taxis to come at a certain time after dinner and transport a handful of us liturgical sorts to St. George’s Anglican Cathedral for their evening Ash Wednesday service. About 8 of us were ready to go, but the taxi never came.
This was unacceptable. Here we were, a bunch of clergy in the Holy Land on the first day of Lent. Surely we could duct tape together a liturgy in a hotel conference room. And so we did. One person went looking for bread and wine. Another to find a plate and cup. Another Episcopal priest in the group brought down a prayer book from his room. I went outside to find some dead palm frond fragments to burn for the ashes.
It wasn’t the smoothest service in the world, but it was powerful. In our own small way, we not only gave each other the gift of entering Lent as an ecumenical praying community, but I think our small intentional act of contrition brought a little more cosmic healing to the world that day. We remembered that we are dust, that we remain dust, and that our actions and inactions can return others to dust much sooner than God intends. Our acts of repentance, all of us together in small communities gathered throughout the world, help scrub the ash of sin off the face of the earth, one particle and one life at a time.