![]() In that way I would be reminded, again and again, of what this season is for. In the old days, my Lenten resolution almost always meant giving up something whose absence I would feel acutely: coffee, perhaps, or cussing. And isn’t the promise of immortality what Lent prepares us for? How will I make ready, now that I am without a church? What rituals will I observe, now that the Stations of the Cross no longer belong to me? ![]() For myself, at least - and only for myself - I don’t even mind the idea of mortality, for I have thrown in my lot with immortality. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The longer this pandemic drags on, the clearer those words become.Īt 60, I am making peace with the dust to which I will return. It’s a day for fasting, reflection and prayer, a somber reminder that our lives are brief, our days running out. I even miss the ashes.Īsh Wednesday isn’t a day for rebellion. I miss serving in social justice ministries. I loved my parish, and I loved our brilliant, compassionate pastor, but I was done with the institutional church. I came to understand that my growing feeling of spiritual alienation wasn’t temporary. Then the pandemic quarantines left me unchurched through no choice of my own, and the death of our last parent, for whom there would only ever be one church, left my husband and me free to make our own choices about where to worship. Human institutions are inherently flawed, and I have always loved the rituals that linked me across time to so many others facing fear and loneliness and pain, to so many others finding solace in their faith. For decades, nevertheless, the gifts of my faith outweighed the pronouncements of the institutional church that I found alienating or enraging. I have had a troubled relationship with the church of my childhood since childhood itself, when I learned in Catholic school that I would never be allowed to become a priest. The priest will say these words on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, but he will not be saying these words to me. Performing this ancient ritual, he will murmur, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” NASHVILLE - On Wednesday, in Catholic parishes across the world, a priest will dip his thumb into a pot of ashes - the burned remains of blessed palms from last year’s Palm Sunday Mass - and smudge the sign of the cross on each congregant’s forehead.
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