McAshes

Ashes have a context.
Ashes are not decorative.
Ashes hold memories and lead us into the future.
Ashes come with words that pierce our hearts and and our lives so we will see more clearly.
Ashes have the power to transform - shake us up.
Ashes come with a meal - a full meal - a meal in which all of us who fall down rise up to look each other in the face and then face the reality of who we are and who we are graced to become.

Do not let me walk by and be marked and then go on my way as though I know what this smudge means and you also need to know what it means for me.
Do not let me drive by and be marked - like the scene of a drive by shooting that leaves behind victims and no healing - just a mark of blood on the sidewalk and a bundle of wilted flowers.
Do not let me walk around with a black cross painted on my forehead so that the world will come to think that dress-up is what I do when I claim to follow Jesus.
Do not let me walk to the cross with Jesus thinking a soiled forehead is like a humble get-off-the-cross-free-card as I enter Lent.
Do not let me fool myself and my neighbors with a smudge that allows me to believe that I need not budge from my way.

Ashes come with a bit of silence.
Ashes come with glances around the room to see others also making ready for a journey to the cross.
Ashes come with the poetic images of who we so often become and offer images of who we are meant to be.
Ashes come with the faces of old men and women - marked for a movement through death and life.
Ashes come with the faces of young children in the arms of adults - ashen faces.
Ashes come with the remembrance of the night in which he was betrayed and a holy line of saints open to be fed with the gift of life.
Ashes come with a touch that is more than the passing of a finger over our foreheads - it is the touch the comes when wounded and broken and burnt people can look around and smile and weep and wonder at how we will walk in the way of the Christ - together.

Ashes are placed on the foreheads of the followers of Jesus to open up our hearts - not to alert others that we have been to church - or we claim to be Christians - or look how we follow disciplines that make us appear holy.
Ashes are placed on our foreheads so as to sink into our heads and move us into new life that opens our hearts and minds to the creative genius of our God who is for us before and after all that can come upon us.

Ashes mark us for us - not for anyone else.
Ashes shape our witness - they are not our witness.
Ashes help us see the full story - they do not tell the story to others.

Over all the years of marking and being marked with ashes, I have followed a practice that has made sense to me. After our community gathering and sharing and living and dying together, I look in the mirror at my ashen forehead - and I wash the ashes off. They are not there for others - for strangers - to make a witness. Those ashes become like commandments written on hearts - the life that emerges will be the display of the way of Jesus among us - fearless in the face of the ashes of our lives.

So, when I hear about drive-by ashes available at your local discount congregation, I wonder what other discounts are available. That, I guess, is the shape of Christianity that appears to have some appeal these days. Cute - easy - convenient.
Drive by is like -  having it my way.
Drive by - keep going at our own pace - keeping within our own space.
Drive by - taking what you want - disengaged from community and font.
Drive by - like taking the freeway that has cut through and has forgotten the stations of the cross of the lives - over which it passes.
Drive by - on the way to a holy act over there - because ashes close to home cannot be shared.

From dust we came - To dust we shall return.
TRRR