Rainfall and Ashes
when life feels like a never-ending lent.
It’s been a long week. I meant to write this essay on Tuesday, but then I had a sick kid home from school, who then stayed home Wednesday and Thursday, completely turning my perfectly laid plans upside down. I’m sitting watching the rain fall outside my window. It’s been raining for two days straight. It started as sleet and the trees in my backyard looked so sad and forlorn, drooping from a thin covering of glassy ice.
It seems appropriate that lent would start this week. In this dreary, gray, melancholy moment we smudge ash on our foreheads in a rite of humility and remembrance. I haven’t always followed the liturgical calendar, but in the same way my appreciation of the pagan wheel has grown over the last few years, so has my appreciation for the church’s time-marking. Lent is the season leading up to Easter and has historically been a time of fasting and almsgiving. It seems interesting to me now that this fasting time would have coincided with the time when stores were running low and the anticipation of spring and abundance would’ve been deeply felt. I feel this too.
I do not participate in the fasting tradition, mainly because I gave up many many things in my early years as an evangelical - although I’ve seen a few things like “Fasting from Food Waste” that I could get behind. My aim now is to feel a sense of presence, and lean in to the energy of this time of year - the remembrance of my mortality, the solemnity of deep winter, and the promise of renewal even after death. I may read a book or two1, pull some tarot cards or listen to a reflection by Richard Rohr - but other than that I will sit quietly with the reality that much of life has felt like one long lent. For a few years now.
As I was scrolling through social media yesterday I saw a post from an acquaintance who said she doesn’t normally practice lent, but she appreciates the rhythm of the church calendar and “a time to acknowledge our failed nature and then align our hearts with Christ” - I debated messaging her, but my wiser self won out. So I’ll vent here instead. Lent isn’t a time to acknowledge our failed nature, it’s a time to recognize and remember what is: we are dust. This isn’t a failure, it’s reality.
The need to constantly point to our very human nature as perverse and failing and fallen is the biggest reason I left the fundamentalist church. When I look around I do see failure, don’t get me wrong. This time last year, I watched multiple families that I love lose someone irreplaceable. And even this year my extended family has dealt with incredible loss. The weeks around Ash Wednesday hold the anniversaries of some very heavy things. And my family is not unique. Add to that heaviness the weight of a school shooting mere hours from my city, a cataclysmic environmental disaster in my home state - yes, I see failure.
One of my favorite tarot writers, said so beautifully this week: “Lent is neither about humiliation or punishment. But we begin by remembering we are dust.” Like the etymology of human from the Latin word “humus” for earth or soil. We are Earth. Stardust. And to stardust we will return.
When I drew a card for this week, I drew the Wheel of Fortune. Ah, Life! The cycle, the turning of the wheel of life! We are finite beings and our lives turn and turn and then they end. This season of lent is forty days to remember that all of our joys and accomplishments and ego trips and degrees and books and cars and dreams are just a turn of the wheel - here today, gone tomorrow. We also know that no matter how hard or devastating life may be, the wheel will roll on and we will someday find a reprieve from our grief. The wheel is also a compass, orienting us to what is - Will we resist? Will we numb? Or will we walk our path? “To remember we are lowly…is for humility not humiliation. We remember so that we might find our serenity in surrendering to the journey ahead2.”
Today I’m going to sit in that dark, quiet space. I don’t have ashes on my forehead, but I’m keenly aware that life is disappointing, life can leave a taste of ash in your mouth. And still, “A troubled and broken heart, O God, You will not despise.”
Planning to read May It Be So and, if I’m really ambitious That All Shall be Saved by
This quote is from Tarot for the Beloved and her beautiful posts/prompts for Lent.
Beautiful sharing and insights, Lindsey. Grateful and honored to be a partner in the synergy of this reflection! <3
We are dust. What a poignant reminder of the cyclical nature of our lives. Beautiful writing.