For Ash Wednesday, 2021, Sister Joan Chittister asked two questions that Pastor Janell then brought to the congregation, as Creator pondered this verse from Joel. This brought to my mind answers to these questions:
1) What doors of your heart do you need to open this Lent? and
2) What "worlds" in life have I "allowed to go sterile" in my life?
I have felt both unsettled and grounded every Ash Wednesday since. I have been aware of impermanence, yet held by a community where faith is lived rather than explained. Ash Wednesday that year became a moment of shared humanity, honest questioning, and sacred solidarity, affirming that faith is something to be inhabited with a life, not just beliefs.
Faith inhabiting a life, what does that mean?
“Rend your heart and not your clothing.” Joel’s words refuse the safety of surface religion. They cut past gesture and spectacle and go straight for the interior life, the places we protect, avoid, or quietly let go numb. Lent, in this light, is not about what we display, but about what we dare to open.
Sister Joan Chittister’s questions linger with me. They are unsettling in the best way. What doors of your heart need opening? What worlds have you allowed to go sterile? They assume that hearts have doors, that lives have inner ecosystems, and that neglect, not malice, is often what leads to barrenness. Nothing dramatic. Just unattended places where imagination, tenderness, courage, or hope once lived.
Ash Wednesday has a way of finding those places.
When the ritual shifts from well-practiced to embodied, from observed to inhabited, faith stops being something we manage and becomes something that happens to us. Words like you will die stop floating above our heads and land in our bodies. Grief, aging, political anxiety, and communal loss are not distractions from faith; they are the very terrain where faith is tested and told. And last year, I went from observing to inhabiting.
What emerged is not morbid fixation, but clarity. Death was no longer an abstraction; it became connective tissue. Personal sorrow links arms with social fracture. Private fear echoes public unrest. And suddenly Christian witness is less about answers and more about presence, about standing honestly in the truth that we are dust, together. Last year's Ash Wednesday called for the presence we can embody this year.
To rend the heart is to let that truth be felt. That kind of honesty does not come easily. It requires spaces, like Ash Wednesday, that make room for humility without humiliation, sorrow without despair, questioning without exile. Music that aches. Scripture that doesn’t resolve too quickly. Ashes imposed not as spectacle, but as sign of a shared vulnerability. Rather than Pastor Emillie imposing ashes on those attending, we imposed ashes on each other last year. In such moments, faith is not explained. It is practiced. Lived. Breathed.
This is what it means for faith to inhabit a life that begins, not with a demand, but with a voice. Listen.
So we have today's Scripture reading from John. Before confession, before ashes, before bread and cup, there is a call. The Good Shepherd speaks our name into the noise of our lives. He knows where we have wandered. He knows which doors are rusted shut. He knows which inner worlds have gone quiet from neglect or grief or fear. And still, he calls.
Ashes tell the truth we resist: life is fragile; love is costly; death is real. But they also tell another truth just as boldly, we belong. The mark on our skin is not only about mortality; it is about claim. You are mine. Not owned by fear. Not defined by failure. Not surrendered to sterility. Claimed by love that lays itself down.
The cross traced in ash holds both realities at once. We are dust. And we are loved beyond death. Lent does not ask us to choose between them. It asks us to live inside the tension, trusting that what feels like loss may also be an opening..
So Lent is not about proving devotion or perfecting discipline. It is about opening what has closed. Tending what has gone sterile. Learning the sound of the Shepherd’s voice amid the many others competing for our attention. Trusting that even in shadowed valleys, we are not abandoned.
We leave Ash Wednesday smudged and honest, ash on our skin, grace in our bodies. We go not as polished saints, but as beloved sheep who know where to return when we lose our way.
No comments:
Post a Comment