Joy and Grief: Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is an especially poignant moment in the liturgical year for me. Six years ago on Shrove Tuesday, I came out. It was the beginning of a long few months of inviting people into my truth. It was a mixture of terror and jubilation, but it all began with a conversation that day when I finally accepted who I was.

The following day, after a beautiful Ash Wednesday service at Glendale Baptist Church (my first Ash Wednesday service), our pastor's family was in a car wreck where their youngest child was killed. 

That Lenten season was difficult. Our church family grieved. In many ways, those of us who knew and love Emmie still grieve. 

And every year when I receive my ashes, I feel those two emotions profoundly: joy and grief. I feel them to my very core as though I am still 21 years old. While both have faded as I've grown and healed and changed, that moment of the imposition of ashes brings them back. The rawness of those juxtaposed emotions engulfs me.

I'm still not sure what I'm giving up for Lent this year, though I have a few things in mind. But I will never forget the year when we gave up too much.

Nadia Bolz-Weber has a phenomenal thing to say about Ash Wednesday and Lent that really encapsulates the journey I feel like I take every spring:

“Here’s my image of Ash Wednesday: if our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and we don’t know the distance between the two, then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and the ends are held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. The water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the past and future to meet us in the present. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God: that we are God’s, that there is no sin, no darkness, and yes, no grace that God will not come to find us in and love us back to life. That where two or more are gathered, Christ is with us. These promises outlast our earthly bodies and the limits of time.”

May it be so. Amen.

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