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.