Ash Wednesday
When I was 36 years old, I nearly died. I should have died. Really.
I had played racquetball with a friend on the Monday before Thanksgiving,
and tore a calf muscle. The following
Thursday, I collapsed at a local restaurant.
I couldn’t breathe. I had blood
clots in both my lungs. I have since
learned that having blood clots in both lungs is about 90% fatal. If it wasn’t for a fast-thinking nurse (thanks
Nancy) at the restaurant, and the grace of God, I would have certainly
died. Since that experience, the words
and reflections of our annual Ash Wednesday observance have taken on a
particularly pointed meaning for me.
As the ashes are placed on our foreheads with the words, “Remember
you are dust, and to dust you shall return”
we are reminded that we all will die.
That is one of the two things each
and every one of us on this planet have in common (the other one is being
born.) We are dust. But, so many people in our culture today do
their best to ignore that, to deny it, and even defy it.
I taught “Death and Dying” for fifteen years at the college
level. It always amazed me that my
classes filled to capacity almost every semester. My students WANTED to talk about mortality… about the mortality of others, about the
death that they had witnessed, and experienced, and observed in the death-filled
world around them. But sometimes they
seemed to have a very hard time grasping the truth that THEY would die.
That their time on this planet was limited.
That their time was precious,
That their relationships were precious,
That THEY were precious.
The problem is, when you deny the reality of death, when you
try to ignore mortality… it is easy, very
easy, to devalue everything. It is very
easy to get to the point where we really can’t see the worth of anything; where
we can no longer grasp our need for God.
For a savior. For One who can
show us the way through death.
The season of Lent is a time of penitential reflection on
the limits of our lives (and the many ways we transgress those limits), and a time
to be reminded of our need for God and God’s love and grace. It is also a time of renewal as we embrace the
reality of those limits and celebrate the freedom from them won by Christ. In the passage from Matthew, Jesus reminds us
where our true treasure lies – in the God who created us, and who loves us so
much that God took on our frail, mortal flesh and died for us so that we might
have life and have it abundantly. God loves
us so much that God gave us eternal worth, and infinite value by adopting us as
children through Jesus Christ. During
Lent we are reminded that we can, and should live in the light and power of
that amazing gift.
Peace,
Bishop Mike
No comments:
Post a Comment