Lenten Reflections

The Sign of the Cross

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season that culminates with Easter. Many Christians will stand in line to receive ashes on their foreheads, acknowledging the truth of what we are told in that moment: we have come from dust, and we will return to dust.

It’s a sobering statement, and for many people the observance is discomforting, awkward, even creepy – so much so that they will avoid the ritual altogether. That reaction may be a symptom of what poet, essayist and, yes, funeral director Thomas Lynch calls “the estrangement between the living and the dead.”

In an excerpt from his book, The Good Funeral, published in “Aeon” magazine, Lynch writes: “For many bereaved Americans, the funeral has become instead a ‘celebration of life’. It has a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries such as me — the undertaker.”

He continues: “The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death might have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.”

There is a similar tendency to disconnect during the weeks leading up to Easter; to celebrate the glowing Christ of the resurrection and hide the bloodied body of the crucifixion. By doing so, we ignore the fact that we can’t put on our heavenly garments until our earthen body dies. As Lynch puts it: “Ours is the species bound to the dirt, fashioned from it according to the Book of Genesis. Thus human and humus occupy the same page of our dictionaries because we are beings ‘of the soil’, of the earth.”

Instead of facing the gritty, earthy reality of the crucifixion, and with it, our own death, our nod to the earth and soil is store shelves stocked with baskets full of bright green plastic grass, pastel pink eggs, yellow chicks made of marshmallows and brown bunnies made of milk chocolate. All of that is mostly the modern, day-glow version of ancient spring celebrations that centuries ago were grafted to the holy days of Easter.

True enough, Easter Sunday is and should be a grand, bright celebration of God’s love through the resurrected Christ and the promise of eternal life. But while Easter tells us that death has no ultimate sting, neither does death have any consequence for the present if we don’t acknowledge it. Only then can we face life – and our brief opportunity to love, share and minister to others – with any authenticity and urgency.

That is why we stand in line for ashes. It’s grim and sober, yes, but if you use all of your senses, you can feel the ashes etched onto your skin in the sign of the cross. It’s a good feeling – a feeling of life that has purpose now and forever.