Eager for Renewal

FROM THE RECTOR

Yesterday, during Ash Wednesday services, I saw something I should have expected but somehow seem to forget every year: people were eager to be in church. They wanted to hear the message of our mortality, to answer the call to repentance, to accept the invitation to a holy Lent, and to renew their relationship with God. It may seem strange or even cynical for a member of the clergy to express surprise at people’s enthusiasm for their faith, but it is not their eagerness to encounter God that I find surprising but their desire to meet God in the wilderness of our Lenten journey.

Even before our first service, I saw that eagerness becoming manifest. On an average Sunday, there may be one or two people in church ten minutes before the 7:30 a.m. service, but a steady stream of people started walking in more than twenty minutes before the service started. Nervously, I checked the church’s website to make sure I had not misremembered the time when the service was scheduled. It turns out that lots of people just wanted some extra time to sit quietly in church and prepare their hearts and minds for this holy encounter.

At each service, I saw people whom I remember seeing last year on Ash Wednesday but cannot recall seeing since. Clergy are used to greeting the Christmas and Easter “faithful” twice a year, but I always forget how many people make the start of Lent the one time when they are sure to be in church. At Washington Regional yesterday, I was invited to offer ashes to members of the hospital staff who could not get to church because of their work schedule. Nearly thirty stopped by. Among them was a man who admitted to me that, because of a scheduling oversight, it was the first time in his life when he would not be in church to receive the ashen cross. Surely it is a strange sort of faithfulness that draws people to church on Ash Wednesday—to a service in the middle of the week that offers a countercultural focus.

I suspect that it is the countercultural element of Ash Wednesday that makes me wonder why so many people find it so attractive. As two of the hospital chaplains and I reflected together, the message conveyed by the ashes—that of the inevitability of our death—is one the world usually avoids at all costs. Although hospital staff deal with the fragility of life every day, the rest of us go to great lengths to escape it. Those of us who are forced to encounter it—whether in our jobs or in the lives of those we love or in ourselves—often have difficulty sharing the experience with those around us because people typically do not want to hear about death. On Ash Wednesday, however, people show up in church in theory because they want to hear it. Why?

Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we are invited to step away from the comfort that comes with ignoring our mortality and confront it head on. Why would that bring people to church? Because our faith promises not a temporary escape from the inevitable but a final victory over it. In a world in which the goal of life is largely the avoidance of death, Christianity teaches that death is merely the gate through which we pass from this life into the next. While this life is good and something for which we are grateful, we recognize that it is only through death that this life and our place within it can be made new. 

All day long, I felt an unnecessary urge to rush. I instinctively feared that the worshippers at the early service would be in a hurry to get to school or work. The prolonged silences and the penitential recitation of Psalm 51 at the midday service left me unsettled as I wondered whether people who had taken time out of their day would find the experience worthwhile. At the hospital, I wondered whether those who stopped by would want to take time for a quiet encounter with God or would prefer to skip straight to the smudge of ashes on their forehead. In the evening, as we tried to welcome fidgety children who are used to playing in the parish hall on Wednesday nights while maintaining the dignity and solemnity of Ash Wednesday worship, I felt keenly the need to keep things moving.

In the end, though, people left when they needed to. There was no need for me to push things along. People came to church to be renewed in their relationship with God, and they stayed as long as that pursuit was fruitful. They came to hear the familiar, inescapable message of their mortality and of their need to return to God, and they came to be reminded that their lives, while fragile, are bound up in the unbreakable love that God has for them. That is why Ash Wednesday is so important. Once a year, we examine our own limitations in order that our faith in God’s victory over them might be strengthened with a confidence the world cannot give. That is the hope for which we prepare during Lent. That is the hope that awaits us at Easter.

Yours Faithfully,

Evan D. Garner