Ash Wednesday Reflection
The traditional ash mark received at an Ash Wednesday service
by Elizabeth Jones
It’s Ash Wednesday tomorrow and I have been thinking continually of an Ash Wednesday I experienced a few years ago. There was lots of excitement surrounding this Ash Wednesday. Our little church plant in San Francisco was invited to partner with a very large church in San Francisco for what would end up being our largest worship service to date. Since the large church’s worship leader was out of town, I ended up being scheduled to do music for this service, for which I felt very honored and excited. What many others didn’t know is that my husband (Ryan) and I were also excited because I was pregnant.
Unfortunately, the week before Ash Wednesday, when I went in for one of my ultrasound appointments, we discovered that there was no longer a heartbeat. We had lost the baby. All of the excitement of the pregnancy, all the excitement we had shared with our friends and family when we told them about the pregnancy, and the excitement of our little church getting to be part of a big worship service, was absorbed into my grief. I felt within myself that I was no longer carrying the life of my baby; but that rather, I was carrying the lifeless body of my baby. I was filled with the strange shame that comes with miscarriage and told my husband to share the news of our sadness with everyone with whom we had previously shared our joy. I didn’t know how to move from a place of expectant joy to a place of hidden grief for someone whom I alone had had the privilege to physically embrace.
When I entered the Ash Wednesday service a few days later, I was still feeling the physical repercussions of having a miscarriage. But instead of feeling the shame of having moved from life to death, I realized a unique space and time had been created in the church. It was a set aside space which gave me permission to grieve what I had lost and to grieve the extensive ways that all is not right in the world and in my own heart. Yes, Jesus came and He has given us the Holy Spirit and the hope of new life. But there is still death, there are still horrific injustices and traumas that affect people their entire lives, there is still war, there is still so much in this world that is not right and will not be right until Jesus comes again.
Ash Wednesday, and the subsequent penitential season of Lent, is the primary space where the church historically has collectively leaned into lamenting the ways that our souls and our world are still broken and dying.
At Iona House we follow the historic church calendar and lean into days like Ash Wednesday and seasons like Lent. Just like the natural, created order exists in seasons transitioning from death-growth, cold-warmth, pruning-fruiting, we also need seasons where we have space, time and solidarity to grieve, repent, and confess in order that we may rejoice, feast and celebrate. After all, it is on Ash Wednesday when we are reminded in the words of Genesis that we are creatures: “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Apart from Christ these are words of despair, but in Christ our mortality is overcome in His resurrection life. The season of Lent always bursts into Easter, just like winter bursts into spring.