Ashes to ashes

By Tyler Tankersley

I am a Baptist, through and through. I know every verse of "Just As I Am" by heart, I still have my denim Royal Ambassadors vest, and I believe the three main food groups are casseroles, pies, and watered-down Kool-Aid. I am proud to be a Baptist, but I have also grown to love and appreciate the wisdom that is found in the wider palette of the Christian tradition.

Growing up in my childhood Baptist church, we never talked about such things as the seasons of Advent or Lent. For us Thanksgiving was the marker for the start of a monthlong Christmas season and Easter just seemed to randomly pop out of nowhere each spring. However, in my own life, the rhythms of the church calendar seasons have become meaningful and foundational in my faith.

This is especially true for Ash Wednesday. For many Christians Ash Wednesday is the day when they wonder whether or not to tell their co-workers that they have a smudge on their forehead. But for those who take its message to heart, Ash Wednesday serves as a solemn and necessary reminder for us to realign our priorities toward the priorities of God.

Ash Wednesday is about mortality. It is about death. Ash Wednesday is the day when we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we shall return. In the creation story found in Genesis 2, God gathers up dust (Hebrew: adamah) and breathes life/spirit/breath into the dust so that it becomes human (Hebrew: adam). On Ash Wednesday, the stark reality of our finitude is made plain and clear to us. We are forced to reckon with the notion that this life is temporary and what we do with it greatly matters.

The Benedictine writer Joan Chittister says it well: "Ash Wednesday is a continuing cry across the centuries that life is transient, that change is urgent. We don't have enough time to waste time on nothingness. We need to repent our dillydallying on the road to God. We need to regret the time we've spent playing with dangerous distractions and empty diversions along the way. We need to repent of our senseless excuses and our excursions into sin, our breaches of justice, our failures of honesty, our estrangement from God, our savorings of excess, our absorbing self-gratifications, our infantile addiction, our creature craving another. We need to get back in touch with our souls."

This Wednesday at noon I will be at the Ash Wednesday service at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Cape. I will sit in the pews of that beautiful sanctuary and my friend Ellen Gurnon will remind me that I am dust. Then I will offer either my forehead or my wrist and she will use dust/ash to make the sign of the cross on me.

I will look at that smudge on my body in the sign of the cross and it will remind me both who I am and whose I am.