Wednesday Wonder
My Journey from Disdain to Delight in Ash Wednesday
It was the summer before my junior year of high school when I began to read my Bible for myself. During that time, my faith was awakened. It transformed from going through the motions of my upbringing (I was a pastor’s kid after all) to a genuine desire.
But I was a teenager. The line between Spirit-enlivened passion and pride-induced self-righteousness is thin.
I attended a Lutheran high school. We observed Ash Wednesday at our school.1 Students would gather for the Ash Wednesday chapel service between second and third period. After a short message, students were invited to receive the “imposition of ashes”—charcoal in the sign of the cross on their forehead. My church background was nondenominational. I was unfamiliar with church calendar days beyond Christmas and Easter. I learned about Lent in middle school from a friend with a Catholic background. He said he was giving up soda for Lent. I found that repressive and repulsive.2
Thus, with my nondenominational church background and my recently awakened faith, Ash Wednesday at my school was something to buck up against. I was dedicated to the “It’s not about religion, but relationship!” mantra. And this practice reeked of “religion.”
Ash Wednesday, and Lent for that matter, was a tradition I held in disdain. Looking back, I cannot help but marvel at the level of self-righteous immaturity on my part. But at the same time, what can you expect from a seventeen-year-old?
Today, at 34, Ash Wednesday is a day I delight in with wonder and reverence.
From Heartless Religiosity to Heartfelt Repentance
I will give my seventeen-year-old self a little credit, though. I remember seeing kids receive ashes on their foreheads who did not live a life demonstrating hearts ablaze for God (whatever I thought that should look like for my teenage peers). They were going through the motions from their upbringing. The Scriptures have a lot to say about going through the religious motions void of heart. The Old Testament prophet, Joel, calls the people of God to “Tear your hearts, not just your clothes, and return to the Lord your God.”3 The tearing of clothes was an ancient practice of lament and repentance. But Joel is telling them, “Yeah, don’t bother tearing your clothes if your hearts are stone-cold. It’s performative and meaningless.” Jesus, confronted by the religious elite about the lack of fasting practice among his disciples, quoted Isaiah: “So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’”4
Going through the motions is not what the Lord is after. But disengaging from ancient worship practices because of a stubborn, prideful heart also misses the point. The wonder and depth of Ash Wednesday were overlooked.
True Tradition: Heart Reformation Through a Story Re-Enactment
Over the years, through my study of and engagement with the ancient traditions of the church, I have realized that days like Ash Wednesday increase my affection for Jesus rather than foster a dead-hearted religiosity. This is the point, after all. These traditions are to be a re-enactment of our shared story—the good news story of the Kingdom of God made available in and through Jesus. According to the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, there is a difference between tradition and traditionalism. “[T]raditionalism is the dead faith of the living, whereas tradition is the living faith of the dead.”5 Ash Wednesday, far from lifeless religiosity, overflows with life-giving symbolism. It is an embodied practice of remembering our mortality—something we Americans do not naturally do. We have ashes placed on our foreheads as a reminder of our past and our future. Our past, that we come from the dirt and are merely dirt apart from the enlivening breath of God (Genesis 2:7), and our future that we will return to that from which we emerged (Psalm 90:3). A couple of years ago, I facilitated an Ash Wednesday service. During the sermon, I held up the glass chalice that contained the ashes we were about to invite folks to receive. I declared, “Behold, your future.” After the service, I kept the chalice with the leftover ashes on my desk as a reminder of my future.
As humans—unlike what the Enlightenment taught us about being merely intellectual, rational beings (brains on sticks)—we require a holistic, embodied experience of the story of God. Reading the Bible is certainly essential. But that ought not be the extent of our engagement with God’s redemptive story. Serving others is an embodied engagement with the story of God who came down to us to serve. Receiving the Eucharist (Communion) is an experience in which we consume the meal Jesus gave us—a meal representing the story of God’s sacrificial love for us that we literally take into our gut. And receiving ashes in the sign of the cross re-shapes our imagination to remember our mortality in a world fixated on avoiding death no matter what the cost (Bryan Johnson, for example), or ignoring the reality of death. But this is not a morbid fixation on death. It is a somber remembrance of our mortality, rooted in the story of death’s defeat (Isaiah 25:8, 1 Corinthians 15:54).
The Wonder of Ashes
Let’s be honest: without understanding the context, Ash Wednesday is weird. That’s certainly how my seventeen-year-old self felt. It exuded grotesque traditionalism. The somber mood is uncomfortable. And being reminded of one’s fallenness and the reality of death because of sin is antithetical to the present-day cultural milieu of self-esteem. Nevertheless, this practice is charged with depth and wonder when the gaps in context are filled by the story this tradition re-enacts. If embraced, such wonder adds fuel to the fire of affection for Jesus.
Ash Wednesday is a day in the church calendar dedicated to repentance, fasting, and remembering our mortality and fallenness as Christians begin 40 weekdays of fasting leading up to the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
A few years later (my sophomore year of high school), I made a decision to never drink soda again. I’ve held to that decision and have not missed it. I guess Lent would not have been that bad of an experience for 7th-grade David.
Joel 2:13, CSB.
Matthew 15:6–9, NRSV.
This is Eugene Peterson’s words summing up Pelikan. Eugene Peterson and Marva Dawn, The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 35.