We were planning to attend our church’s Ash Wednesday service last night, but it was canceled because of just enough snow in our area to make driving a bit dicey. But our pastor sent a thought-provoking article that’s too good not to share. I’ve posted it as I received it:

Ash Wednesday Forces Us to Confront Death, but It Also Offers Hope by Tish Harrison Warren – Opinion Writer, New York Times, February 27, 2022.

I recommend the 3-page article in its entirety. Here are some highlights:

We as a culture tend to strenuously avoid the fact of human mortality. Of course, we all know that we will die. But those of us who live in places that feel safe and who are relatively healthy, with friends and family who are relatively healthy, can arrange our lives to avoid thinking about death. With the blessings of modern medicine, people are living longer and when death comes it often happens in medical spaces, far from where most of us live and spend our time. Gone are the days when graveyards frequently circled churches, a bygone reminder of the intrinsic connection between our mortality and our practices of faith...

(I think Jimmy Carter’s decision to die at home has gotten a lot of press partly because it’s different.)

An Ash Wednesday service was one of the first liturgical services I ever attended. And it hit me hard. We, the living, gathered to name the fact of death. The priest marked the foreheads of children, even newborn babies. It felt so true and countercultural, and also incredibly sad. I have since presided over several Ash Wednesday services as a priest, and it still hits me hard. In the service, I tell the members of my congregation, one by one, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This black mark of death rests on every forehead — the young and old, rich and poor, strong and weak, sick and well. We carry on our body a recollection and proclamation that we, and everyone we love, will die...

Covid’s specter of mass death challenged any flimsy hope that we can control our lives and be rescued from mortality, loss and pain. For many of us, facing the immovable fact of death quite naturally raises questions about God. With nearly a million lives lost to Covid in the United States alone, more people find themselves longing for religious rituals that acknowledge mystery, meaning, horror and hope in death…

After commenting on Karl Marx’s famous quote about religion being the opiate of the masses, she offers this stunner:

Still, in my own life, any numbing effects of religion don’t hold a candle to binge-watching Netflix with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a bourbon on the rocks…

There are myriad reasons that wealth might dampen faith. But one is that those of us who are privileged and comparatively comfortable can insulate ourselves from death, suffering and our own mortality in ways others cannot. Whether one is a churchgoer or not, when our bodies are strong, our stomachs are full, and we have high-speed internet and craft beer, questions of eternity seem less pressing...

She ends with this reminder of hope:

But Ash Wednesday doesn’t end with an invitation to distraction or consumer comfort. Nor does it end with the imposition of ashes. After the ashes, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the priest asks that “at the last we may come” to God’s eternal joy. Then we take Communion together, a tangible decree that ashes give way to beauty, that death gives way to resurrected life…We need more than diversion, work and pleasure. We need deep, resonant, defiant hope.

The Apostle Paul put it this way:

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15.51 – 57, ESV)