Ash Wednesday takes me back to Palm Sunday and an ancient ritual our church practices. Stick with me. Let’s start with Palm Sunday, some nine or ten months earlier.
I’m not that dexterous, but one thing I love to do on Palm Sunday is to take the palms we’ve been given at church and weave them into little crosses. Sitting there in the choir loft, I’m reminded of how the events of Holy Week start with this joyous crescendo and then catapult into the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and finally the Resurrection.
Those crosses sit on my desk for months, the green turning to brown, my attempts at basket weaving drying up on the edge of a pencil holder or letter box. If I’m ever tempted to throw them away, I remind myself of how their purpose will come soon enough, just as the Christ story resonates with us throughout the year.
On Shrove Tuesday, when our church hall smells of pancakes and sausages, those old palms are gathered and burned in the night air. On Ash Wednesday, they will become the ashes our ministers mark us with, the reminders of our own mortality.
I’ll stand in line and the minister will say, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” marking me with those ashes.
“Gosh, it seems so dreary,” I might say to myself, this marking of death. Then I think of where those ashes came from and how they are part of the story. We held up those palms, rejoicing, seeing how death wasn’t the end but the beginning, how our salvation came through Jesus’s one life, lived heroically, sacrificially, showing us mortals the way to eternal transformation.
The cross we’re marked with has changed our lives forever.
As Lent begins, let me give up what gets in the way of following Your Way.
—Rick Hamlin
