Ash Wednesday always feels like such a necessary pause for reflection. This year’s comes just a few weeks after the first anniversary of my mother’s death, and I meditate this morning with a small portion of her ashes reposing in a blue and white ceramic jar on my altar. I took them out the other day— contained in a small plastic ziplock wrapped in a velvet pouch given to me by the funeral home— and let myself feel the ashes between my fingers, sharp bits of bone making them surprisingly gritty. They’re not like the fine grey powdery ash that’s left in a fireplace.
I heard a story once, from someone who managed burials at a church, about a family that was fighting over their mother’s ashes. A daughter, waiting in hope of the resurrection, was insistent upon keeping the ashes together. Her sister wanted to scatter them at sea, and apparently it had come to a lawsuit between them. The first woman, fearful of losing the lawsuit, procured a second urn and filled it with kitty litter so she could hand it over if required. But then she forgot which urn was the true urn. She brought it to the burial manager to help her sort it out.
I can’t imagine it would be that hard to figure out, if you’re willing to get your hands dirty, but I suppose most people aren’t. As I child, I was terrified by the thought of dead, mouldering bodies. I still can’t say that I would relish the thought of encountering one in an active state of decomposition, with all the smells and mess. But death itself doesn’t hold the terrible fear for me it once did. Handling freshly expired bodies in a hospital ICU will do that for you.
For so much of human history, death was an intimate companion to life. We washed the bodies ourselves, we dug the pits or cleared the stones from the caves for burial. When, after a year or so, the maggots and bacteria had stripped all the flesh from the bones, we gathered them up with our own hands, placing them in boxes or urns, keeping remnants as relics. From earliest times, the altars of Christian churches contained relics of the saints, as they still do in Catholic churches. All magic, even that of the Eucharist, is necromancy in some respect. Remembering that we are dust, and to dust we shall return is the first step to living a life not free from fear, but not bound by it either.
Here’s a song I return to every Ash Wednesday. I may have even posted it here before. Written by Elvis Perkins on an early autumn Wednesday in the wake of his mother’s death the previous day— September 11, 2001— his lines always stick in my head this time of year:
No one will survive Ash Wednesday alive No soldier no lover No father no mother
I was going to share with you some lines from T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, which is also a perennial for me on this day. But as I paged through my volume of The Complete Poems and Plays, my attention was caught by a passage from Choruses from “The Rock” that speak to one of the primary reasons I stay in the church, its rituals, calendar, and liturgy— to stay rooted in these seasons of remembrance, and the community of the dead and the yet-to-come with which we are inextricably bound:
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and all that they would forget. She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft. She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts. They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good But the man that is will shadow The man that pretends to be. And the Son of Man was not crucified once for all, The blood of the martyrs not shed once for all, The lives of the Saints not given once for all: But the Son of Man is crucified always And there shall be Martyrs and Saints. And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps We must first build the steps; And if the Temple is to be cast down We must first build the Temple.
The dead are still and always with us. The Halloween/All Saints/All Souls Triduum is probably the most appropriate time to remember them. But Ash Wednesday is a moment to remind ourselves that one day, we’ll join them. I like to believe that it will not be merely an end, but also a beginning. The more I’ve spent time remembering them— listening to their whispered voices in forgotten cemeteries, staring into deep, bold eyes in black-and white photographs— the less afraid I am and the more I feel their love and support stretching throughout the centuries. When I pray the old, rote prayers— an Our Father or a Hail Mary, with its lines about the hour of our death— I hear them praying with me and feel their weight at my back, pushing me forward. They urge me to build the Temple, even knowing that it too will one day be rubble and dust.
Today, of course, is also Valentine’s Day. I’ve never been the anti-valentines type. I like romance, I like chocolate, I like pink and flowers and perfume and jewelry. I even like those chalky candy hearts. But this year I have no partner, no chocolate (I’m happy to buy my own, but I’m eating keto, so no carbs), and Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday. So I’ll ask you, in the midst of any celebrations you might have, to spare a thought for the dead and for the mouldering temple of your own body and know that to remember is to root yourself in the rich composted humus of love that has made this lifetime possible.
Love how you closed your beautiful writing!
Chills.