Ash Wednesday

Buechner: Ash Wednesday

“In many cultures, there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days.”

 —Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (Harper & Row, 1988), p. 82.

We begin our Lenten journey on this Ash Wednesday. It is a day to remember our mortality: “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” I think of my favorite aunt, who had Alzheimer’s for more than ten years, who died on Ash Wednesday.  

I remember watching the members of our parish receive the imposition of ashes. Some have cancer or other illnesses, and I know they worry whether they will be present in this body at this church next Ash Wednesday. Some are filled with tears as they stand or kneel at the altar. I wonder who will meet death face to face before next Easter. Could it be even myself or a member of my family? I never imagined we would not be in our churches for two Ash Wednesdays.

I travel back in time to the Cathedral School on Ash Wednesday, when we heard elementary students comment as we placed ashes on their foreheads: “Will it stay on? How do I look? You look funny.”

I remember a beautiful young mother holding her three-month-old baby girl and coming to the altar. Our priest traces the sign of the cross on the mother’s forehead. I do not want her to put the cross on this baby’s head.

I watch as she asks the mother, and then applies the black ashes to the tiny forehead. The little girl does not cry out, but I want to stand up and protest: “No, don’t do that!” My life profession has been to care for tiny babies. I do not want to think of this precious one dying. I will not permit it. I still have no answers as to how to handle the death of a child. 

Ash Wednesday is a reminder of our immortality. I still have difficulty with it. A huge part of me lives as though I and others will live forever. As I grow older, I realize this is not true, as I begin to treasure each day as a gift. Easter tells me there is more than this life—resurrection—a resurrection, a new life. Barbara Crafton calls this life in the resurrection The AlsoLife.

I think again of my aunt. I still sometimes feel her presence. That same Ash Wednesday she died, someone calls to tell me that a dear friend is having her first baby today and has asked for prayers. I pray that the presence of God in the spirit of my aunt will be by the bed of my friend to guide and protect her and her unborn child. 

It is always thus. One person dies, another is born. We all carry the blackened sign of the cross on our forehead. My mind returns to the Cathedral School as I remember a sermon by Beth Maze on Ash Wednesday: “Creation Is Made from Dust.” 

It is good that we have these forty days to ponder all this.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

 

 

Nouwen: Love Never Dies

Nouwen: Love Never dies

“When we lose a dear friend, someone we have loved deeply, we are left with a grief that can paralyze us emotionally for some time.

 People we love become part of us. Our thinking, feeling, and acting are co-determined by them.”–Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey.

 When loved ones die, a part of us changes. That is what grief is about. It is that slow and painful change in our relationship with someone who has become an intimate part of us. Nouwen goes on to say, “But as we live through the change, they become part of our ‘members.’ As we ‘re-member’ them, they become our guides on our spiritual Journey.”

The God of my understanding does not give us a person we love deeply and suddenly allows that relationship to end with that person’s death. Ours is a God of love. The love from that companion we so profoundly cared about is still there with us. We are still in a relationship with that person, but in a way we do not understand. Their love does not stop. Our love for them does not stop. Death is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma.

Sometimes, when we remember events of ordinary and extraordinary times with the person we loved, we will also feel their presence and wisdom. We can still talk to them in this new relationship, which is still a mystery. Nouwen believes we can sometimes be even more intimate in this relationship than in real life. It is their love that we feel.

Love continues and never dies. Our loved ones are now in some way always present with us, while in life, they were only present when they were physically with us. Some people find it helpful to wear a piece of jewelry or clothing as a physical reminder of a relationship that is now spiritual.

The grief recovery work we have been involved with for over twenty-five years, Walking the Mourner’s Path, believes that one of the most helpful ways to stay in a relationship with our loved one is to honor our relationship. Amazing transformations have occurred. People have started suicide prevention programs, built walking trails, written books, developed new careers in helping professions, built halfway houses for those in recovery, and given land where their loved one died to habitat for humanity.

 When my Grandfather Whaley died, I returned to the church and stopped smoking to honor him. My grandfather’s love cared for me while he lived and saved my life, even in death. I still feel his presence today, even over forty-five years since his death, especially as I write about him this morning and send that love on to my grandchildren.

Over the past several years, I have been rereading letters my grandfather wrote me in college and medical school over sixty years ago. Words cannot express what it is like to feel his unconditional love through now-typed antique letters. I share some of his letters with you in Letters from My Grandfather, A History of Two Decades of Unconditional Love.  

my grandfather’s 20 siblings

Kites on Clean Monday

Kites on Clean Monday

Guest Writer Susan Cushman

Orthodox Christians worldwide will enter Great Lent on Clean Monday, March 3, this year. You can read about why Western Christians (Catholics and Protestants) celebrate Easter (Orthodox Pascha) on a different date here. But this year, we celebrate together on April 20. I love it when our dates converge!

At St. John Orthodox Church here in Memphis, we began preparing for this day at Great Vespers on Saturday night, when we chanted verses about Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise and commemorated the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, you can read it here. There are three things we learn from these martyrs that we need to enter into any kind of martyrdom, any kind of self-denial, even if it’s only increased fasting and prayer for forty days (Lent):

40 Martyrs of Sebaste

(1)  love for Christ,
(2) love for one another, and
(3) courage.

Why courage? For some of us, denying ourselves the things we use to numb pain or escape the reality of life at times takes courage. But also love.

Sunday night at Forgiveness Vespers, we exchanged the rite of forgiveness. You can read a good article by Fr. Alexander Schmemann on this here.

There are almost always tears as we ask one another for forgiveness, “Forgive me, a sinner,” and offer the response, “God forgives, and I forgive.” At the end of the rite, the choir leads us in a few Paschal hymns. The joyful, victorious message of those hymns reminds us, at the beginning of Lent, that we’re heading towards the Resurrection. Without this goal in mind, our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—our ascetic struggle—could easily become legalistic actions rather than life-giving vehicles of God’s grace.

The Greeks have a beautiful tradition—they fly kites on Clean Monday to celebrate letting go of our sins that weigh us down. I love that image. It reminds me that even this extra body weight I’m carrying around because of gluttony keeps me earthbound. I hope to lose some of it during the Fast, but mostly, I hope to draw closer to God.
May God grant us all a Good Lent!

Susan Cushman

Susan Cushman is a convert to Orthodox Christianity (since 1987) and is married to an Orthodox priest, Father Basil Cushman, who is Associate Pastor at St. John Antiochian Orthodox Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Susan is a retired iconographer, a published author of five books, and editor of four anthologies. In her personal and spiritual memoir, Pilgrim Interrupted, which was published in June of 2022, she shares much of her journey to Orthodoxy and its healing impact on her life.

 Joanna  joannaseibert.com   https://www.joannaseibert.com/