you should definitely NOT celebrate ash wednesday
you’re going to live forever
My son turns 16 this summer, a fact that makes me feel simultaneously frightened and old. The reality that he will be old enough to drive in a few short months scares me, not because of who he is, but because of who I was at that age.
I was dumb. I said and did dumb things. And putting dumb behind the wheel of two tons of steel is a frightening thing.
I know studies say that the current generation of teenagers engage in far fewer risky behaviors than my peers and I did three decades ago. But I can’t help but remember doing donuts in the gym parking lot or seeing just how fast I could get my V4 engine to go on a late night freeway and a little shiver goes down my spine.
Maybe it’s those sorts of memories that makes my generation of parents tend in a helicoptering direction.
The reason adolescents (at least used to) tend to take dumb risks is because they’re convinced of their invincibility. Death is a distant thought, an abstract idea that happens in nursing homes and hospitals. Young people don’t die. Only old folks need to think about that sort of thing.
adolescent america
In the nation that brought you the Golden Bachelor, Ash Wednesday is not a popular holy day. We long ago stopped having funerals in favor of memorial services and celebrations of life. We’ve allowed the adolescent aversion to/ignorance of death to control us at a civilizational level.
Adolescents rarely think of death. That’s probably a good and healthy thing. But adolescence naturally gives way to adulthood. As a person ages, they typically grow in wisdom as well. Grey hair is often the mark of experience and understanding.
But as a culture, we’ve shunted “grey heads” to the side. The elderly live in nursing homes, away from the rest of public life. That way, they can’t remind us of things like death.
We tend to live stubbornly ignorant of the inevitable, and find it dreadfully unfair when the inevitable arrives.
remember you have to die
Since about the 8th century, Christians have taken the time on Ash Wednesday to do the opposite. The traditional invitation in Latin is memento mori—remember you have to die. This isn’t dwelling on the morbid in an obsessive or unhealthy way. It’s a wholly sane embrace of human reality.
Ash Wednesday is a chance to physically enact in corporate worship what our Scriptures teach us.
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all people, and the living will lay it to heart. (Ecclesiastes 7:2).
Great Christian thinkers and writers through the centuries have reiterated this truth in each generation. Nearly six centuries ago, the spiritual writer Thomas à Kempis wrote:
Be always ready, therefore, and so live that death will never take you unprepared.… How happy and prudent is he who tries now in life to be what he wants to be found in death.1
Christians live each day in the light of death. We lay the truth to heart in the corporate confession of sin, the imposition of ashes, and the recognition of our mortality. If you’re (foolishly) convinced you will live forever—or that you’ll just deal with death some other time—then you should definitely not celebrate Ash Wednesday.
If, however, you are interested in learning how to inhabit the Christian faith, you should take the time today to come to grips with the truth: you have to die. But in Christ, death has lost its sting (1 Cor. 15:55-57).
earth & ash
Christ turned death inside out in the resurrection—this is the central belief of our faith (1 Cor. 15:17). That’s why St. Paul could write, “To live is Christ, to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21).
Dying may scare me more than my teenager in a hatchback. But my faith says it doesn’t need to. Somehow death opens a door into something richer and more beautiful than anything I’ve known in my life till now.
The recognition that I will return to earth and ash—and so will you—unites us in ways we don’t fully understand. Cole Arthur Riley writes of the solidarity we enjoy when we are marked by ashes on this holy day:
What does it mean that we don’t just talk about the ashes, or even reverently observe them, but that we physically smear them across our faces? Perhaps, in the marking, we approach solidarity. We remember that the same fate that haunts you, haunts me. The same beauty that birthed you, lives in me. And that this comes as a mark on the body, I think, reminds us that the Lenten journey of self-examination is deeply entwined with the physical world.2
Oddly enough, in a worship service focused on our mortality, we emerge feeling a sense of unity that comes from our common destiny. We are all destined for the grave. Denying that deprives us of community with our fellow mortals.
Embracing it helps us embrace one another. And it allows us to anticipate the day when our earth and ashes will be raised in glory.
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.23.
Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies, 246-7.