This season of Holy Lent, our theme is all about telling and hearing and sharing our stories.
The first two installments of our daily blog will be a pair of essays about the experience of taking "Ashes-To-Go" out into our community at large. In observance of Ash Wednesday, John McDargh and I took some of the ashes from our 7:30am service at St. Paul's out to two Newton T-stops and offered them to…..anyone and everyone. John went to Newton Centre and I held forth in Newton Highlands.
Below is a short sharing of John's story. Mine will be posted tomorrow
Reflections on the
Offering of Ashes
By John Mcdargh This morning after our 7:30 am launch of Lent
at St. Paul’s, I donned an alb and with
a plastic container of ashes and a damp paper towel made for the Newton Centre
in-bound Metro stop on the Green Line. I
discovered this morning the wisdom of Sara Miles new book City of
God: Faith in the Streets ,who says
that when the church leaves the safety of its own space and gets out
where the people are, and in ways that
are generously sacramental, “things
happen”.
Numbers of people approached me to
ask for ashes, but the most memorable
encounter was with the first man to whom I offered ashes. “Yes, thank you. I am Catholic”, he replied
and then added that his high school aged son was an altar boy and went to a
diocesan high school in Springfield. I
wondered whether he felt he needed to establish his religious credential before
receiving this sign of our shared mortality and common need for God’s healing and hope. After I had placed the smudge of burnt palm
on his forehead and prayed with him we stood and talked for some time before
his train arrived. He offered that he
had a degree in accounting but that some years ago for about eight years he had been unable to
work because of a perfect storm of illnesses:
a stroke, a heart-attack and a
long difficult recovery. Now that he is able to work again, at least part- time , potential employers note that lacuna in his resume and do not want to
talk with him ; and even if he is given
the chance to explain the circumstances
they still do not want to touch him. I
shared with him my thought that on this
day it is perhaps such employers who are
most in need of this visible reminder of
the vulnerability and fragility of every human
life , and to experience the way
in which this might open the door of our
hearts to the radical compassion exemplified in the life of Jesus.
As I left the station, my frozen hands finally getting the best of
me, I found myself remembering my
first Ash Wednesday in Washington DC at Coast Guard Headquarters which
was then located next to St. Dominic’s Church which on that day of the year distributed ashes all day on the
half hour beginning at 6:00 am. By noon
when I left the building for lunch it seemed that every other person I
passed - and in
range that crossed age, gender, class, physical appearance and race - had an
ashen cross smudged on their foreheads.
I suddenly found myself close to tears as I imagined that somehow on this single day of the year an invisible sign we all bear miraculously became visible. The
black cross announced to all who could read it:
“this precious human person
beloved of God, she too will die.”
I recall that this limerick came to mind by
that great Anglican poet W. H. Auden. He expresses
with typical humor a sober
realization about the human condition that is in fact the place we are asked to
stand in to begin the Lenten journey back towards the Creator who “hates nothing that He/She
has made” (Book of Common Prayer for Ash Wednesday) .
As
the poets have mournfully sung,
death takes the innocent young,
the rolling in money,
the screamingly funny,
and those who are very well hung.
death takes the innocent young,
the rolling in money,
the screamingly funny,
and those who are very well hung.
-W.H. Auden
