While it’s been a long time since I actually believed in any sort of god or savior beyond my own psyche, I never fail to grow contemplative around Ash Wednesday. As a holiday – a holy-day in the truest sense of the word – Ash Wednesday always fascinated me. It was eerie, beautiful, dark. The creature hidden in the closet that nobody talked about but, when you open the door on that one day of the year, stepped out with a strange and feline grace, her dark fur glossy and dusty and oh-so-elegant in its secretive and forbidden finery.
It reminds me, in the way that things can only remind a creature of book and word, of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” And not simply because of the title.
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
Ash Wednesday is a time of silence. A time where congregations of people who are uncertain and unsure – both of who they are and why they pause in their lives, in the very midst of their days, to sit and daub themselves with ash – gather to simply breathe in one another’s company, to draw into themselves the air and the word. The Word.
O my people, what have I done unto thee.
We are the people. We are the suffering, the crucified, the dying. We. The ashes smeared on our foreheads are our own. They are the reminder – the words we hear every year, at every funeral, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – of where we have been and what we will become. They are our signal to mourn the losses of our lives, the little and the large, to allow ourselves one hour out of our day to lament and languish, to smear ourselves with the paint of grief and wallow in the strange patters we find our fingers drawing on our skin.
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
We force ourselves to believe in hope. We force ourselves to believe that there is something more, something beyond… but we rarely manage to answer beyond what? We do not hope to turn, we do not hope, we do not hope to turn again…
We have turned before, O my people, we have turned and will turn. Our lives are composed of the turning of the stair, of the twisting and winding of the hourglass, the turning and turning over, the timeless moment before the grains tumble the other direction, carrying us back and forward all at once.
the time of tension between dying and birth
Our lives are… turnings. Windings. Stairs. Our lives are the moments that exist between birth and death, and we hope for a turning that leads us back, from death to birth. And there is no shame in that hope. No folly. There is shame only in no hope. Shame in refusing to hope for another turn, to hope for another day, another hour. There is folly only in placing our dreams beyond our own hands. Dreams are meant to be shared. Meant to be formed and reformed, turned and returned, drawn and written and revised. Reenvisioned.
Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
In my Ash Wednesday, I sit alone, naked, in a warm garden filled with flowers curling from the ground like smoke, their leaves and stems and petals the sepia tone of old photographs, the fading black-brown wash of ink. In my Ash Wednesday, the ashes are a thick paste-like paint, kept in pots that rest their little clay bottoms and feet on stone and grass. And all the color of ink and ash. They are warm. The ashes glide onto my skin like silk, stain it like henna set for days, draw out the patters of my lives and hopes – oh, yes, I have had many lives, many hopes – and trace the promises of my dreams. And I have dreams.
Dreams in which Angels sing demons to sleep, in which wings are formed of feathers made of words, in which my skin gleams with sweat and sings in a language I cannot yet understand, but one I hope someday I will learn.
In my Ash Wednesday, there are hands that are not my own, and they draw new patters, trace new words, new dreams, new hopes, onto the canvas that is my skin. They are gentle hands, warm hands, hands with patches of rough that tingle and tickle what they touch. I know whose hands they are.
In my Ash Wednesday, there is no division between life and loss, no division between hope and despair, no division – Suffer me not to be separated – but all is a revel in the glory of our lives, our dreams.
In my Ash Wednesday, there is fire. Heat. Passion. There is screaming. There is laughter. They are the same. In my Ash Wednesday, there is promise.
And let my cry come unto Thee.
In my Ash Wednesday, a phoenix is born.
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