Ash Wednesday has always been a conundrum for me. It rarely played much of a role in my own history as a Christian. Last year an acquaintance, now a bishop, wrote that in March 2021, "the Lent that never ended begins again," referring to the sudden closure churches and subsequent isolation starting the previous March, 2020. This year 2022, I might add, "the Lent that never ended begins again, again."
I was raised in a middle-of-the-road so-called "liberal" Congregational Church in Michigan. A church of GM regional middle management, local businessmen (1950s-1960s: they werealmost all men; my father was one), and agricultural commodities dealers (sugar beets!). Ash Wednesday was a small, add-on holiday for a congregation with a limited liturgical year—most characterized by what we did not do (ashes! unlike the Polish Catholics and German Missouri-Synod Lutherans who dominated the area at that time).
When I was in Princeton and later, my sense of Ash Wednesdays varied. I lurched, over a decade, from ordained Presbyterian ministry to lay membership in a medium-high Episcopal church in New York City ("off-Broadway" compared with Smokey Mary's "Broadway"). It led a socially edgy AIDS ministry in the 1980s and 1990s, and Ash Wednesday for me had varying levels of seriousness. Fast forward to the 2000s and I joined a progressive "Anglo-Catholic" Episcopal parish in New Haven that ostensibly takes Lent very seriously. With a touch of liturgically theatrical ostentation that I never found congenial. ("Anglo-Catholic" meaning what, really? pseudo-medievalist nostalgia? A 19th-century fable to justify empire?)
My church in New Haven has many important and estimable qualities: sponsoring a community soup kitchen; hosting an annual gathering of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim youth, providing a home for a "house of study" for young adults seeking a gap year of post-baccalaureate social service; reaching out to Yale students with an otherworldly, meditative Sunday compline during term. So many good things. I feel I should be more supportive, and I do what I can to support those ministries, but I'm no longer present there, figuratively and in many cases physically.
I feel utterly out of touch, so out of synch with Ash Wednesday this year. That never-ending Lent again, again. Pandemic, insatiable grievance, climate change and the collapse of nature; a live-streamed, intentionally brutal war in Ukraine, not to mention: wars in Colombia, Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, the Congo, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanamar/Burma, not to mention the Uyghurs, Taiwan, and North Korea. Much closer to home the unending cycle of urban murder. Way too many guns. This wierd not-this, not-that, in-between time that we all live in, now with the shadow of nuclear war hanging over us again.
I cannot escape the heritage of Ash Wednesday that has focused so much on individuals' sexual and petty-moral sins. Like Annie Lamott's "enemies lite," but here "trespasses lite." I'm no angel, but my trespasses in the great heap amount to a pretty small hill of beans, and my obsessing about them is just a distraction. Granted the Great Litany rehearses life as it is: earthquakes, famine flood, war, hypocrisy, hard-heartedness, contempt, violence of every kind, boundless human suffering. Nonetheless, in that classic catalogue, the sins that stick out again and again in Christian past practice: inordinate and sinful affections, and the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Complemented by a Rite-I prayer of confession with centuries-old, tradition cadences addressed to a distant emperor or peevish, bitchy Tudor monarch. It's stylistically consistent but —for me, at least—just misses the point.
Lately I have read Margaret Renkl's confession that this year ecclesiastical Lent will not count her in and Jimin Kang's I Gave Up English for Lent. I'm in broad sympathy: the Lent of self-imposed sacrifice just does not speak to "the fears I cannot shake— for my country, for my planet — and [speak] toward a stronger faith in the possibility of redemption, a more certain conviction that all is not yet lost in this deeply troubled world." (Renkl) The power of language to shape and distort reality, to live outside of English: to find "what is uniquely yours to offer" that "can be gleaned only by what you can — and have already — received from the generosity of others." (Kang)
I'm inextricably bound in this body bound for ashes—at 68, I'm accepting more and more that these are the days of my one-and-only life, and that I war born and have lived in specific time that, with me, is passing away soon. (Though not quite yet!) Inextricably bound to a world of environmental degradation—how could I ever live without plastics, carbon, and petroleum, given the daily choices I face? Sorrowful for the communities I have known that have vanished, blown away by economies, drugs, and hatred —deaths of despair. The sorrow that Patrick Laurie feels for Galloway, commodified with forest as a carbon offset for rapacious corporations elsewhere, resonates strongly for me even though my environmental and geographical location is so different.
This Lent is not an ecclesial Lent, at least not for me. I have learned from Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer that the living Word, the encounter with the Word, may well (and probably will) take place far from the courts of house of the Lord. The center of our life in the periphery of our communities. the stranger unlooked-for among us. The refugee. The undocumented.
Somehow I still seek to find the practice of hope that eludes me, the practice of faith that somehow all is not lost for our world, my community, my nation. To acknowledge with Paul Lehmann the darkness of the Gospel: that the practice of love confronted with the power politics of the world is so utterly unfit, so laughably at odds with what passes for reality, that its presence transfigures the encounter on the frontier of life; another reality breaks in as a tangent touches a circle. Who would ever have anticipated the self-denying leadership of Volodymyr Zelensky? — speaking truth to power, who in the event of his probable death will become more infinitely powerful than his murderers-to-be could ever imagine.
The Lent that never ended begins again, again. Like Renkl, I feel more and more that I am an unchurched Christian. (Maybe "barely churched" is more accurate.) In the past two years, for the first time of my life, I have stopped attending worship regularly, even online. For a while, a long while, it was a hiatus not by choice. When I could choose to attend, sometimes —or often— I just have not heard the call. When I did attend it felt as worship by half-measures, too often undertaken with ever-watchful fear of contagion that allows for nothing unplanned, nothing unauthorized, inappropriate, or unexpected. Bars, cafés, and gyms were more than half-full, church not even half so. Hymns half-sung through a mask have seemed an exercise in liturgical nostalgia. I have become half-unchurched, sometimes suffused with regret, but often not. I don't know how long the other half of unchurched will take.
Lent was never an end in itself; it led on to passion and resurrection. The suffering of the planet, my neighbors, my friends, and countless others is a passion beyond description. Too many deaths, too much illness. On too many days, all seems lost for the world that I love. New life ,whenever it speaks, acknowledges wider reality beyond description. Outdoors, or with a friend, or when listening to the music so deep that we become the music. "The ploughman shall go out in March and turn the same earth / He has turned before, the bird shall sing the same song. // Shall the bird's song cover, the green tree cover, what wrong / Shall the fresh earth cover? We wait, and the time is short / But waiting is long."