Wilderness

Ash Wednesday was hard.

I had a hard time looking at my Facebook feed, seeing smiling selfies with the imposition of ashes upon many a forehead. Looking at those pictures, I found myself wanting to scream at the computer screen. I wanted to tell my friends and colleagues, "This is absurd! You have the markings of ashes on your forehead, yet you look so damned happy."

Then I had to stop and think, "Okay, Tuhina, what is going on?"

I didn't observe Ash Wednesday this year. Or maybe I did, but not in a traditional setting. I spent most of Ash Wednesday in bed. I wasn't going to church for a multitude of reasons. Some of those reasons were:

• I'm currently about 3,000 miles away from the parish where I serve;
• I was sick due to an overly generous visit from the snot fairy;
• I wasn't prepared to drive a car not familiar to me in the aftermath of an ice storm in the South; yet most of all...
• I wasn't ready to have ashes placed on my forehead and I wasn't ready to hear the words pronounced to me, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

I'll admit, I find myself in a wilderness of sorts. Death lurks around the corner in this wilderness. I vacillate between the cool calmness of logic and the tempest whirlwind of emotion. Logically, I think I understand that my father is dying from cancer. This cancer defies logic, though. This cancer is vicious; the man who was a force to be reckoned with is still incredibly sharp in mind, but cruelly trapped in a body that is failing him. Emotionally... well, my emotions are encased in the shiny silver ball ricocheting all over the pinball machine of the classic five stages of loss and grief. My pastoral colleagues tell me this is normal; if I'm going to be entirely honest, I don't know what normal is anymore.

Ash Wednesday is particularly difficult this year because I'm not ready to hear the words, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return." I'm not ready to hear those words this Lent because my father wishes to be cremated when he dies. He wishes to truly return to that form of ashes whence we came, from the adamah from which we have been formed. And this year, on Ash Wednesday, to have the imposition of the ashes on my forehead felt too real, too close to my father's mortality, too close to the tactile nature of adamah.

As a Lutheran, I am grateful for the sacraments, especially for their tactile nature. I am grateful for the bread and the wine that are Christ's body and blood, that feed me and sustain me and keep me connected to the body of Christ. I am grateful for the water that has led to my own death and rebirth. But it's the tactile nature of ashes pressed to living skin that I had a hard time with this year. The ashes of my personal Ash Wednesday were not the burned up palm leaves from last year's Palm Sunday. My ashes were instead were the particles of dust flying around as I sorted through the items that accumulated throughout the course of my parents' marriage. This Ash Wednesday, I think I get it.

"For you are dust, and to dust you shall return."