Smudges--An Ash Wednesday Musing

“What’s a smudge?” my new secretary asked as I gave her this title for my Ash Wednesday meditation. Good question—what’s a smudge? I thought for a long time before I answered. “Elaine, a smudge is a dirty mark. Sometimes it’s a blot or a blur. Sometimes I’ll pull a printed page out of the computer too fast and it will smudge the paper. It wasn’t dry!” A smudge, I told her, was when your Mama licks her finger and says, "Let me get that spot off your cheek."

We know about smudges, don’t we? The spots we leave. The not-rightness of something. The dirty track we leave behind long after we are gone.

Lent is the season of smudges. We spend 40 days thinking about our humanity, our weaknesses, our earthiness. We turn to old Scriptures like: “Rend your hearts and not your garments...” or further on down the page: “Return to the Lord, your God for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” We turn to Psalms and confess: “Have mercy upon me O God…” We are talking about smudges.

William Safford one of my favorite poets wrote:

                                  “It’s too heavy to drag,

                                    this big sack of

                                    what you should have done.

                                    And finally

                                    you can’t lift it any more.”

Because our sacks get too heavy and we have a hard time lifting them we come back to Ash Wednesday. We remember that other forty--forty years when God’s people lived from pillar to post—doing stupid things. Struggle, rebellion, pain and downright shame. We also remember that another forty—forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness struggling and praying.

There is so much in our sacks we have not yet dealt with. I like the way the author of The Right to Write puts it: “…very often, without knowing it, we slip ‘out of synch’ in our lives. We are subtly out of alignment, off our center, and it happened without our noticing. At times like this, we need help integrating, coming back into a whole.” And so we come with our brothers and sisters stand in the long line and wait for the ashes. We, like fellow strugglers through the ages, begin our forty day journey again.