Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2004

My son, Chris, always offers me great stories to ponder. Today, he offers this one as a reflection of the journey of life and the power of the simple act of the liturgy on Ash Wednesday.  I don’t know where you are as you begin this Lenten journey, but I pray that you will join me in this season of reflection, repentance, and forgiveness leading to the Day of Resurrection, Easter.

Sam Lloyd is the former dean of the Washington National Cathedral in D.C. Many years ago he was a graduate student studying modern literature in a rigorously secular Department of English, surrounded by friends, few of whom were believers, and nearly all of whom were unhappy. He was doing a good deal of intellectual wrestling with his faith, and he was also trying to sort through where the rest of his life was headed.

Maybe you can relate. One afternoon Lloyd decided to stop by the Ash Wednesday service at the university Episcopal church, not recalling much about the service except that it had something to do with ashes.

Lloyd said, “I remember even now the power of the moment when I walked up to the front and a priest rubbed ashes into my forehead and said, ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ I was overwhelmed by the sheer raw truthfulness of that act.

It came crashing home—I am finite, fragile, a creature who has been given these few short years to live. My agonizing about exactly what I believed seemed less pressing; my anxieties about where my life was going seemed a waste of time. I have been given this time now, I realized, before I return to dust, to be what I have been given to be. I was amazed by the power of a church service to tell me the truth about my life.”

Lloyd said, “I found the church telling me what we usually learn only in crisis times of tragedy or loss—that most of the things we obsess over, and exhaust ourselves with, get furious about, and lose sleep over are secondary. They are the chess pieces we anxiously move around, forgetting all the while that the whole board has been given to us as a gift.”*

I invite you to receive this life as a gift. And as Fred Craddock taught me, the only proper response to this gift is gratitude.

May your journey this Lent lead you in this way.

* from Dean Sam Lloyd, The Joy of Ash Wednesday, February 6, 2008, The Washington Cathedral Sermons