We mistake the purpose of ashes – our symbol of mortality – for only being about death. They are also an invitation to life.
Ash Wednesday and the truth about discipline
Ash Wednesday | Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
Growing up, Lent was about food.
Every Wednesday night was a potluck. Someone always brought a bucket of KFC, which next to homemade stuffing was about food perfection for 10 year-old me.
Of course, then the adults would have some boring conversation about Jesus or something, so I’d go downstairs and play for an hour. I’d explore the basement I knew well, retracing my regular steps and make sure all the things are in their places.
Then the potlucks would run out when we came to Holy Week. This season of being at church more, eating with friends more, of doing churchy things more crescendoed into a week in which we were at church every day. And near the end of the week, we’d be out of school for Good Friday. So there was no excuse not to go to church.
The house rule: no tech from 12-3 on Good Friday made that doubly so. I may as well be there for some of it.
Alpena had an ecumenical Good Friday service — 3 hours, from noon to 3 — eight churches, Catholic, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and Trinity Episcopal would do the 7 last words. Eight churches, eight preachers, eight choirs.
And in the Great Hall there was a buffet set up for the choirs and pastors.
Lent was about food.
So I never quite understood why all the Polish Catholics in town had to eat fish on Fridays. It seemed strange that the church would encourage that one particular food group. I never heard my dad tell the congregation they must eat broccoli on Thursdays.
Discipline around food is fascinating, though. And what we know about discipline is far more fascinating.
The Beauty of Spit
The five basic tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. Of course, umami is the radical newcomer to the group we learned in school. It’s like savory.
The one of the five that humans have the hardest time with is bitter. None of us are born liking bitter things like dark green leafy vegetables like kale or acidic flavors like coffee or hops.
But somehow we can come to enjoy bitter. This is wear it gets crazy.
The reason we get used to the taste of bitter flavors is by eating bitter flavors. But our taste buds don’t get used to the flavors exactly. Our saliva develops enzymes which neutralize the bitter taste the more we consume bitter foods. Enzymes that weren’t present are increasingly produced by our bodies to make these bitter foods more palatable.
It always seemed to be more brute force than that — that you were beating your body into submission You will like to eat kale! Or that we magically acquire a taste one day Oh heavens! My great appreciation for IPAs has arrived!
No, our bodies adjust. It’s like they’re saying OK, we’re eating this stuff now. Better make it hurt less because our survival may be at stake!
This explains my own experiment with discipline and coffee a few years ago.
I gave up artificial sweeteners for Lent. I also gave up sugar and all sweet things, so it wasn’t just donuts but Diet Coke and Splenda in my coffee. So I started, for the first time, drinking coffee without any sweetener.
I’d walk into the church in the morning, put on a pot of coffee and dilute it with just cream throughout the day. By week three, I was drinking coffee black. By the end of Lent, I kept it going for another few weeks. And the first time I tried a Diet Coke, about three weeks into Easter, it made me gag because it was too sweet.
Discipline
We’re naive about our view of discipline because we don’t quite comprehend what we’re actually talking about. We focus on the restrictions and the expectations. We don’t truly wrestle with what underlies the hardship and the challenge isn’t depriving ourselves of something only. Nor is it adding something only. It’s more akin to adaptation.
I’ve always felt Lent was a case of more rather than less. More food, for sure. But also more awareness and hope.
Like we give an entire day of Holy Week to ponder Jesus’s death. A whole day. Not to worry about the resurrection or what he taught us. Just the death and how it feels to us 2000 years later.
How we have a day, today, to ponder our own deaths. To take the time to actually do that. To tell each other, Yes, you will die! Yes, that is scary; I don’t want to die either! But we all do it! Nor is it the end.
Ashes
Alexander Shaia writes about ashes:
I remember the days immediately after Mount Saint Helens blew in 1980, spewing ash over a wide swath of the green Northwest. Scientists feared that it would be a generation or two before the forests would be able to regenerate. What happened next was a total surprise. The level and speed of growth over the next few years was remarkable. How had this miracle happened? ASH.
We now know that ash is one of earth’s most fertile substances.
So this is what we are doing with one another today. Not only navel-gazing, pondering our own finitude in abject despair (though some of us might succumb to that). We are fertilizing each other. We are putting the fuel for new growth on our foreheads and saying to each other:
Yes, you will die! We all die! But the dead empower your living! And your dying will empower your children’s living! This is our fuel for true vibrant life!
The Secret is Love
We read this gospel every year and get to thinking that we need to be secret givers because Jesus tells us so. And we get all caught up in the particulars of these readings, every time forgetting that this is the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has talked about the blessing of poor spirit and mourning and of embodying the boundary-crossing peacemaking of Christ.
The words right before this, from Matthew 5:43-48 are familiar and germane
‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Which is more of that same hangup if we don’t bear the discipline of new spirit, the transformative property of renewal in love!
But if we cover each other with ash and eat together at a sacred table, and praise God for our humble beginnings and vibrant life, if we make the love of Christ the center of our lives the whole thing changes.
We don’t torture ourselves or make a false choice between giving something up or taking something on. Our hearts swell to change. Our minds tolerate more bitter things in life because our bodies adapt to them.
We change. Our bodies, minds, everything. Our whole lives change. We begin to speak differently, hope differently, pray differently.
And we can turn to our neighbors, even the ones who drive us crazy and offer them love in the form of ashes. Here, it’s like rocket fuel for your soul! This is what love looks like on the outside when love is at your center.
May we receive and give, renewed and offering this love everywhere.