Remember that you are dust...

Lent 1:

I got up this morning very, very early. I left my house well before sunrise to get to the hospital to preside over a 6:30 am Ash Wednesday service. I rose early to begin my Lenten 40 days journey. It was very cold this morning, and dark, and it made me think of Easter morning a couple of years ago. Some of my seminary classmates and I decided it would be a good idea to attend the Stone Mountain Sunrise Service that year. We could not simply get up a few minutes before sunrise. No, we had to give ourselves time to climb a mountain and get situated before the sun came up. Not a big mountain, but still, quite a hike. I'm not sure what I was expecting that morning. I'd never been to this particular event, so I had no frame of reference. When we got to Stone Mountain Park, the parking lot was packed. We found a spot and when we got out of the car, we stepped into quite a crowd of people.

As we started the climb with hundreds and hundreds of people, it struck me that we were on a pilgrimage. And it nearly brought me to tears to have a visual understanding of not making that pilgrimage alone. There we were, among the body of Christ, climbing a mountain, almost literally towards Easter. The climb was easy at first. The base of the mountain is wide enough that you aren't fighting for walking room, and it's a gentle incline at the bottom. As you move on up further, it gets a little more crowded and foot paths are not quite as smooth. You have to climb over rocks and logs. You may stumble a little, but it's not terrible. But the closer you get to the top, the harder it gets. There is more in your way. The climb is steeper. Your legs are tired and you realize that you forgot to stretch before you started. I can tell you that even though Stone Mountain is not a beastly climb by any means, getting a sleepy body to the top before the sun has come up is not a simple task. There was a point that I thought to myself, why did I want to do this? But then I looked around, and I saw all the other people walking the journey with me and then I realized where I was going, and it got a lot easier. Lent, and the Christian life in general, is a little like that. We've never been promised an easy road. It's not all Alleluia (the forbidden word this time of year), all the time. It's not meant for pain and suffering either though. There will be some because pain is a side effect of growth, but its about growth.

Pain and stretching and growth, those are pretty human ideas. And we begin Lent with Ash Wednesday. This is a day in which we truly confront the humanness of our faith. All pretense is stripped away. As I stand in the chapel and in patients' rooms today and staff, patients, and family allow me to touch their foreheads with the ashes which represent the dust from which we came and that to which we will return, I pause to think about what this season means to me. The dust and oil smeared across my forehead and the foreheads of so many others today reminds me that it is that same dust that the incarnate God shook off his sandals and the same oil he held in human hands. As I walk this 40 day journey, I do not walk it alone. I walk with those who are here, those who have come before, and those who are still to come.