Ash Wednesday Experience

I had a profound experience at the Ash Wednesday service this morning at the church where I work as a youth minister. They asked me to help impose ashes at their 8:30 AM service. Now this service is for the staff, children and parents attached to the school that is a part of the church where I work. I arrived early as I promised I would, and I was asked to put on a white robe. I have never 'robed up' for an Episcopal Service, as I am technically a pentecostal minister. I just don't work behind the altar here. The last time I 'robed up' for anything was when I was an altar boy in the Roman Catholic Church a great many years ago.

I have to keep my work as a youth minister and my work as a pentecostal minister separate, for various reasons. So I don't give communion at my church, nor can I perform any of the duties an actual priest performs, though I was once charged with doing some pre-marital counseling. I do such counseling and perform marriages independently of my job at St. Thomas. Additionally, I work as a chapel teacher at a local private school, perform baptisms and funerals, all in some ways separate from my work as a youth minister. Doing any liturgical work at any time is all but unheard of. When I do my other work I wear a business suit as is standard for most evangelical institutions, though I am not averse to wearing the collar some protestant preachers do.

But today I was asked to fulfill a role on the other side of the altar with the liturgy, and I served as I always seek to serve. I did not like wearing the white robe. I feel more strongly now for the acolytes I lead who have to wear this stuff all the time. The service too was a little awkward and was filled with kids who were shuffling and only a few of whom were paying attention. Yet when the children came up to give those ashes, and I was the one giving them, I had a genuine religious experience that brought me out of that place altogether and raised me up to that common place of sages, prophets and seers. I saw, as I've been blessed to see so many times, the ever-changing face of God. There was something about doing THAT service with THAT crowd, made up primarily of 1st-5th graders that laid me low and raised me up as only our Lord Jesus Christ can really do.

Everything that one finds in the direct encounters with God was here. There was life and birth, contained within the awkward innocence of every child's face. Here was El-Shaddai, here was the nursing God who brings life...the Father, Yahweh, what have you. And then there were the ashes and the words 'dust you are and to dust you shall return'. Saying these words to an innocent child while imposing ashes, the burnt husks of the cross-lain palms of the prior year's Palm Sunday, was like reaching one hand into a doorway to another dimension. For indeed as vulnerable as these little children seemed, they come to me, as I argued in my first book, as something inherently eternal. There is something of God in every innocent face. Innocence itself is one of the 'mundane religious experiences' I've written about in such detail on this blood, an invitation to eternity.

Yet while that experience is found in the eyes of everyone of those children, the facts of the world are laid bare by the act of imposition and the words that go along with them. These children, as we all, must and will die some day. The reality of death is rightly the constant companion of every genuine religious experience. It is the shadow cast by the light of meaning and the spirit. In this act and these words are the reality of the cross, for nothing could speak more to the weight of death than that God Himself experienced it. So here you have the Son, and more accurately the Cross.

Yet the ashes and words are accompanied by the shape of the cross itself. And in that shape is also our hope and our salvation. That death was brought into the very life of God is proof it was overcome, and so the hope of resurrection, the power of the Spirit is also present. Put the whole thing together into a liturgical dance and something truly amazing happens, or at least it happened to me. Words seem pale substitute for experience, but they are all I have and so here and now I've shared what I felt with you. May you all experience the same in this Ash Wednesday and throughout your lives.