The Relief of Ash Wednesday

Happy Valen-Ash Wednesday! Or is that Ashentine’s Day?

            This combination doesn’t happen very often so it feels like the kind of thing that should be talked about. Lent has these strange cultural bookends this year. Today is Valentine’s Day. Easter Sunday is April Fool’s Day. It feels like a thing that should be mentioned.

            And in case you think I’m jumping into something secular when I should be preaching on Ash Wednesday, A) hold your horses, we’ll get there, and B) Valentine’s Day has historically been a minor festival in the church.

            There are a lot of legends about this day, including the idea that part of the reason Valentine was lifted up particularly is that almost nothing is known about him, but what we do know is in one sense enough: He lived, he was killed for his faith—some sources say he was beheaded—and then he was declared a saint by the church. Today he is the patron saint of epilepsy, fainting, the plague, beekeepers, and greetings card manufacturers. That last one has been quoted so often that I’m not sure if anybody knows if it’s a joke or not anymore. How can one saint be the patron saint of so many things? Because, in fact, there are 22 saints that go by the name St. Valentine.

            This suggests two things to me: One: The history of the Christian church is vast and astonishing; that a lot of people have sacrificed a lot for the faith. And Two: We need a season to remind us of this; to proclaim that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

            This is one of my favorite days in the church year. I just love it. We just need it. We need to be honest. We are dust. And we will become dust again… just give it time.

            It seems to me that in life we have the option to pretend like we’re immortal. Just live fast, have fun, make no apologies. And, if we’re honest, lots of people do this and live fine lives. They don’t all have death bed conversions; they don’t all feel as if they’re missing something. Some people just live and when it comes time to die they haven’t thought about it or cared much about it; they just fight and then die and that’s it.

            But others of us consider our mortality. We ponder long and hard about what it means to be a human being who is limited by time. We treat age with a combination of grief and joy. We know that there are no guarantees; we know that our bodies will eventually give way. But we do all this, ponder on all this, not in a depressing way—not to feel bad about ourselves—and not out of some voyeuristic exhilaration, like we get excited about death. No, instead we enter into death humbly, like we enter into life, wondering about who we are and what comes next.

            Ash Wednesday is a profoundly Christian day.

            I don’t know about you but I feel something when I get the ashes on my forehead. Again, it’s not sadness and it’s not excitement. It’s much closer to relief. Thank God. Thank God somebody is honest enough to tell me I’m going to die. Thank God we can all say what needs to be said. Thank God we can all admit together how silly and little we are.

            It puts things in perspective, really, but again not sadly and not to get us all excited. Ash Wednesday does not tell us to live for today because tomorrow is not guaranteed—I mean, it might have some of that effect. And it doesn’t tell us to put on black clothes and mourn the tragedy of life—though it could have that effect, too. But I find that Ash Wednesday leaves me feeling free to be human, and to be human is to err, and above all to be human is to give way to age. And that is not the worst outcome. This Christian faith starts there, this Valentine’s Day, so we can move toward resurrection—the great April Fool’s.

            I love this movement from Valentine’s to April Fool’s. Today we admit that we will die, and that love is the one thing that will live on. One day we will rise again, and that love will be the only thing remaining. As it says in Paul’s letter to Corinth, “Faith, hope, and love remain but the greatest of these is love.”

            So we will die. We are dust. But we are also loved. That’s brutal and honest and beautiful and everything we should feel every time we worship.