Ash Wednesday-We Bear the Mark

photo by Lawrence OP /flickr

We stand in the long line. It is deadly quiet. Up ahead a Priest in white touches a forehead with ashes. One be one we come. The old, some on walkers, a smattering of teenagers. A couple holding hands. A man with palsy. Lots of grey-heads. But not all. Some young or middle-age. But it doesn't matter. Here in this line we are all equal. The beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday. Hoping one and all we might just do this season different from the others. "Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world please, please stop in this line."

                            --Roger Lovette

So the old journey begins. When we first started an Ash Wednesday service in the Baptist church where I served, one woman came by puzzled: "Is this a cult?" she asked. I shook my head and she reluctantly let me sign her forehead with the smudge of a cross.  Walking away she was not quite sure what this was all about.

Maybe she was right. Perhaps this act is part of a cult. A cult of all those who are reminded once again that "we are dust and to dust we shall return." A cult of those who kneel and are marked with the sign of the cross. Reminded at this beginning yet another Lenten season that last year's smudge did not stay there long. And despite our yearning for some wholeness we still do not have. Some hope that as we trudge along this forty day walk we'll be better for the walking. Better than all our failures of last year. Hoping maybe, just maybe the pain of too many years will somehow not be erased but we will be released from our wondering about our future and that of the woman beside me I love so much. The old Bob Dylan song, "We shall be released" comes back to me. Dear God make it so.

And so, on Ash Wednesday just remembering once again as if for the first time we need that reminding smudge. We need to be told all over again that we really do need to rend our heart and not our garments. Rend our hearts? My old dictionary says rending means: To tear apart, to split or divide. It also means: to rip to sever--even to chop. Maybe all this means to get rid of all the old brokenness and all the smudges that I carry in my heart. 

I push up from kneeling and turn to go to my seat. I move past that stained glass window of one of the fourteen stations. Jesus falls underneath the weight of the cross. Wearing my smudge I hope when I fall like he fell years ago that I will remember that this is not the end of the walk. He will get up and carry that heavy cross up, up the hill. On this Ash Wednesday I remember He is one with us and we will be carried as he was carried on his own eagle's wings for whatever we still have to do. 

Maybe the woman was right. This is a cult of weird people who bear a mark and know deep in our hearts that it matters. That it matters terribly.     

                        

                                                      "Whenever we try to face life 

                                                              with nothing                                   

        but the strength that is ours, 

          show us, O God, how poor it is. 

           Then share with us thine own, 

              down the ways of thy steady purpose. 

                   Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

     --Paul E. Scherer

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com