Ash Wednesday

*fair warning: curse words below*

During my last year of college, I saw a wonderful counselor and spiritual director named Kristine. I was wrestling with questions of faith, as usual, and I was also wading through some complicated history and trying to tend some old, deep wounds. Kristine was exactly the woman for the job: warm and gentle and kind (everything I was fearing life--or maybe even God--wasn’t), and maybe even more importantly, she knew exactly when to say “shit” and “fuck.” I adored her. 

On Ash Wednesday of that year, I went to the service at my church. The songs, readings, and prayers were all telling the hard truth that Ash Wednesday recalls: we are dust; we are made from dust; we return to dust. This does not just remind us that we’re mortal, though that would be enough. It reminds us that we live like dirt. We act like dirt. We love like dirt. It calls us to mourn our failings and to turn from them, to change. And as I sat in the Hope Church sanctuary, cavernous and beautiful, stark willows adorning a bare altar, I thought, I do not want to have made God sad. And I felt sad.

And then I felt startled, then repelled--almost sick. Contrition left a bad taste in my mouth. I wasn’t sure I liked God enough to care what he thought about me. I didn’t want to care. I didn’t want to bow or apologize or submit. The last few years and all my work with Kristine were about learning to be strong, to claim my own truth, to stand tall, to learn when to say “shit” and “fuck.” No way was I going to start ducking and self-flagellating now. The time for that was past.

The next day was my appointment with Kristine, and I practically ran to her office. Squirming, I told her about the service and my repentant feeling. And then I told her how I wanted nothing to do with it, how I wasn’t ready to go there.

I expected one of her usual pauses, a glance out the window, a searching look at me, a gentle smile, a tempered absolution interwoven with some wise advice.

Instead, she shrugged. “That’s okay,” she said brightly, as though it were the most obvious pronouncement ever. “God isn’t into force or coercion. You can only be where you are.”

A year later, on Ash Wednesday, I wrote her from across the country and told her how much I loved the service at my seminary that day. In our strange, austere chapel, with the space of another year and the permission Kristine had given me again and again to imagine a God of gentleness, I found Ash Wednesday delicious and true. We are dust, God knows: we are dirt. Ash Wednesday and the 40 days of Lent leading to Easter invite us to remember it, to mourn it, and ultimately to accept it.

In the last five years of parenting, counting pregnancy, some things about Ash Wednesday and Lent have once again become more difficult. Much of me still rebels against any expectation of submission, even to a supposed omnipotent, perfect, benevolent creator of the universe. Plus, God and I don’t talk, really. Whereas a lot of 20- and 30-somethings describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” I’m kind of the opposite: religious but not spiritual. I do the religious thing--go to church, observe the seasons, undertake the practices--but I usually don’t know how to make the leap into my own mind and life. I think prayer is bigger than words, but I think so partly because I need it to be: I don’t know how to pray with words and I very rarely do it. So a penitential season that asks me to examine my relationship with God--well, it still makes me squirm.

But in other ways, parenting has made Ash Wednesday and Lent seem endlessly appropriate. Quite simply, I am confronted every day with my fallibility. There’s nothing like a preschooler in what seems to be her first adolescence and a toddler into climbing and screeching to bring me face to face with my own limitation. When I yell at my son, I am dust. When I grip my daughter’s arm too tightly on the way to a timeout that lasts too long, I am dirt. When I physically and emotionally limp through the day because my sleep was interrupted six times in two hours, I know: to dust I will return.

When my daughter was a few weeks old, I was reeling from hormones, sleep-deprivation, a spent body, tender breasts, dizzying anxiety, and the realization hitting me with the force of a freight train every other minute that my whole, whole life was different now and would be forever. One afternoon, we managed to leave the house and brave the world. We stayed out too long, but I didn’t want to nurse her on the go, not yet, so I popped her seat in the car and gunned it home.

By the time we arrived, she was furious and hungry, so furious and hungry that she couldn’t latch on to nurse. After half a dozen laps around the house, some bouncing and singing, some cursing, and some false starts, she finally settled, nursed, and dozed in my arms.

Then it was my turn to cry. Sitting on the lumpy futon in our ugly living room, tears streaming down my cheeks, baby sleep-nursing, I told her, “Oh, baby. I’m going to fail you every day.”

It was a moment of melodrama, but only sort of. It was also true. I love my children deeply and even think I’m a pretty good mom. But I do fail them every day. I am dust. I am dirt.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are honest about this. So, most of the time, are mothers. But maybe a whole 40-day season that asks--and by asking, gives me permission--to confront my propensity to fail can release me from the guilt that so frequently laces my life.

Maybe I can summon Kristine’s beautiful nonchalance. Of course I fail. Of course sometimes I can’t quite face it. Of course sometimes I can.

Of course I am dust. Fuck. And it’s okay.

Transfiguration

We are a few short days from the start of Lent, the dust-and-ashes season of preparation before Holy Week, when we walk through the last days of Jesus' life. But before we get ahead of ourselves like Walmart selling Cadbury eggs in February, we pause, this Sunday, for one of the strangest days of the church year: Transfiguration Sunday.

The Totally Weird Transfiguration

In the story of the transfiguration, Jesus takes three of his disciples, Peter, James, and John, up onto a mountaintop alone. And then something weird happens. The Gospel of Mark describes it this way: "And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, talking with Jesus."

Peter responds clumsily, saying, ""Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." The writer of Mark seems to almost apologize for him: "He did not know what to say, for they were terrified." And then they are swallowed by a cloud and chastised by a booming voice--"This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"--before, in a blink, it is over.

We don't hear anything about what happened after that, before they descended the mountain. Did they stand around staring at each other? Did James and John rib Peter for his stammering offer to pitch some tents when Moses and Elijah made their time-traveling visitation? Did the wine and sweat stains reappear on Jesus' clothes; did the hems become dusty again, or did he make out with a free dry-cleaning? Who spoke first, and what on earth did he say?

The next thing we learn from the writer of the story is simply this: they descended the mountain.

Transfiguration is located at the end of the season of Epiphany, which makes sense. Jesus' blinding white clothes and altered appearance (Matthew's gospel tells us his face was also aglow) were their own kind of light bulb moment, another revelation of who Jesus was. And in case we were as daft as Peter--thank God for Peter--the booming voice spells it out. "This is my son. I love him. Listen."

Peter, James, and John know Jesus. They have traveled and talked and eaten with him for many months. They have shared bread, swapped stories, griped. They have learned how Jesus acts when he's tired or hungry, when he gets a cold, and when his mother shows up. They know his best gifts and graces and his most maddening habits. And he knows theirs. But on the mountain, he changes. He is transfigured. And at once, they can see something new about him, a different, powerful, also-true revelation of who he is.

Sometimes I think parenting is like the work of spiritual disciplines. Not that I should know: I completely suck at spiritual disciplines. I don't just mean I get too busy making wholesome breakfast smoothies and appliqued shirts for my children and occasionally forget to do my morning devotion. I mean I suck at them. I practically reject them outright. For instance, when my husband, who is a pastor (and a good one), invites the church into a week or month or season of spiritual discipline--a prayer practice, for instance--I pretty much immediately think, nope. Long ago, I tried really hard to be spiritually disciplined. I had this mistaken notion that, in response to or because of my practice, something should happen. I should feel something or hear something or know something or change somehow. I didn't. And even though I know now that I was mistaken, I'm still oddly hurt that nothing happened. Nursing this hurt, and then ignoring it, has made me a tiny bit bitter. And so I don't like to try spiritual disciplines. The suggestion makes me want to run from the room, and then eat dark chocolate, and then watch reality TV.

But the work of raising children, I've found, seems like a kind of spiritual discipline, one a hell of a lot harder than the ones I was practicing in college. Every day, I have to take care of my kids, whether I feel like it or not. Every day, I have to dress them and feed them (more than once?!) and hug them and sing to them and put them to bed. Occasionally, I have to bathe them. Always, I have to work at the gestures and vocal inflections and attentiveness that assure them they are loved. And still there are a million, zillion other tasks: nose-wiping, teeth-brushing, toe nail-clipping, hair-detangling, cup-refilling, booger-disposing, vomit-cleaning, antibiotic-dispensing, question-answering, toy-retrieving, pacifier-finding, and so many, many more. People who heartily remind parents to "love every minute" should hang out for five minutes in my favorite Facebook moms' group, where a bunch of wonderful, honest, loving moms routinely confess to each other that, as it turns out, we just realized, we don't actually like kids at all, especially our own.

I think the work of parenting--the often mind-numbing, eyeball gouging work that can somehow wrack me with worry and bore me to tears in a matter of minutes--is like a spiritual discipline because it is what we do, again and again, like it or not, to form us into who we hope to be. We pray or fast or receive communion or go to church or read the Bible (or so I've heard, ahem) because we hope those practices will shape us in life-giving ways. We keep on caring for our kids because it is a practice of love, because it actually, we hope, makes us more loving parents who can better love our children. The work of parenting is what forms us into people capable of parenting.

And then. Then, because we have done the work of the discipline, because we have worked every day--even if clumsily and fallibly--at loving, we might be gifted with transfiguration moments. No guarantees; absolutely no one-for-one payoff. But maybe, after being present through days and weeks and months, we will be blinded by new visions of our children, moments of glory and grace that teach us something new and dazzling about who they are. A moment later, it will be over. And we will have to descend and get back to work.

The other day, my daughter was talking to my mother. She was in a silly mood, excited to talk to her Grams, and all of a sudden, she was a comedian, dead clever in a way I didn't know she could be. This afternoon, my son was playing with his beloved cars, as usual. But in a moment, I looked over, and he was driving the tiniest car down the "road" made by our coffee table's design. He was silent and focused, perfectly attentive to the smallest details of his work. He was an artist, crafting his own tiny, fascinating world.

My daughter got off the phone and whined all the way until bedtime; my son soon pegged me in the head with a puzzle piece and then cried because throwing it hurt his finger. So back down the mountain we went.

But like the disciples who saw Jesus in a new, brilliant way, I too get to carry the moments of epiphany as we head back into the streets and villages, as we get back to the hard, everyday work of learning to love.