The first Ash Wednesday that ever felt true to me was not in my native South but in New England, where winter presses into your bones and dusk seems to fall in midafternoon. I remember walking up Commonwealth Avenue as the last hues of daylight turned to dark gray over the Mass Pike. The cold thinned the breath inside my scarf. Marsh Chapel, Boston University’s neo-Gothic sentinel, glowed from within. The air inside was cool, smelling of wax and old wood.
I had shed belief by then. So I didn’t go out of obligation. I went because it was February. The congregation was sparse: faces that suggested habit more than fervor, a small choir, and a dean whose somber bass drifted just above the hum of heat moving through the vents.
My walk forward was the motion of someone who had learned that a ritual can outlast faith and still be true. The dean’s thumb marked my forehead. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The sentence didn’t accuse or console. It simply named something I already knew.
The heavy door groaned shut as I left, and the noise of traffic outside broke the spell. The grandeur of polished stone and stained glass dissolved into the frigid night. Snow that had melted on the pavement earlier started to accumulate again. The ashes cooled on my skin. They felt honest. For a moment, I was unhoused from my defenses.
Where I grew up in central Florida, Ash Wednesday never quite fit. Azaleas were in full bloom. Fragrant orange blossoms filled the warm air. Spring-training baseball was beginning. But in Massachusetts, the season and the rite spoke the same language. The air itself seemed penitential.
Only later did I see how much that mattered—how the alignment of season and liturgy shaped how I understood Lent ever after. What I received in the Boston darkness wasn’t faith but something firmer: I am finite. I am breakable. I cannot order my own soul.
I walked back to my small Cambridgeport apartment with the ashes still on my forehead, the wind coming hard off the Charles and whitening everything it touched. In the mirror I looked older, or maybe just more stripped of pretense. The smudged cross felt like an outward sign of the distance between knowing God and knowing myself and of how rarely those two kinds of knowledge met.
I washed my face. The feeling stayed. A handful of words, a thumbprint of soot, and an old melody in a winter chapel had revealed the one part of Christianity I trusted even when I trusted nothing else. I couldn’t believe the dogma. But the darkness was real.
For most of my life I tried to understand myself through two great systems—religion and psychology—each promising transformation, neither able to deliver it. Christianity gave me a grammar of sin, grace, and redemption. Psychology renamed the same terrain with trauma, repression, and repair. I moved between them the way a person switches languages, hoping that fluency in either might finally render my life legible. But both required an optimism I could never inhabit.
In church, I learned the shape of grace long before I ever trusted that it applied to me. The creeds were beautiful, the liturgies orderly, but the chasm between doctrine and my interior life never closed. Forgiveness remained theoretical; reconciliation stayed just beyond reach. I absorbed the words. The transformation never came.
Therapy carried its own promise: integration would follow understanding. I believed that for years, through a succession of clinicians revealing the vocabulary of patterns and wounds and insight. But understanding did not move the axis of my life. Interpretation expanded; inner change did not. I became fluent without becoming well.
A professor once quoted a French skeptic: “I believe in God, but in Madame his mother and Monsieur his son, I do not believe.” Later I learned that Jung kept his own reminder above his door: “Bidden or unbidden, God will be present.”
Eventually I saw that these two systems shared an unspoken conviction about what a self is capable of. Both assumed that the person I was could become the person I was meant to be. Whatever their differences, they converged on a story in which I should, by now, have become someone else. I hadn’t.
This is what made Ash Wednesday intelligible to me. It did not offer a new explanation or a better technique. It asked nothing of me at all. Where religion promised grace and psychology promised coherence, the rite promised nothing. It did not try to interpret me into a different life. It simply named what the others softened.
My life never behaved the way religion or psychology’s stories said it should. From the outside, I moved through all the structures meant to form a person: a thousand Sunday services; education across the American Christian landscape; hundreds of clinical hours, including long-term residential treatment and psychoanalysis. If anyone should have been transformed by these systems, it was me. But I was no closer to the person I thought I was supposed to be.
That distance became the unseen structure of my adulthood. Other people seemed to grow into themselves, or at least into a workable approximation. My life unfolded instead through ruptures: relationships broken, ambitions abandoned, quiet destructiveness that left a residue of shame I kept mistaking for identity.
I felt neither redeemable nor improvable. I could speak the language of confession, and I could speak the language of trauma, but I couldn’t rewrite the self who spoke them. My life answered with outward collapses and a stubborn stasis within.
Most holy days presume belonging—Christmas with its families, Easter with its triumph, Pentecost with its confidence in connection. When your life moves instead through alienation and collapse, these celebrations feel like looking through a window at a world that has no place for you. The moods they required were simply ones I did not possess.
Ash Wednesday was the exception. It made no assumptions. It offered no promise that anything would get better. It required no narrative of growth or progress. It spoke directly to the condition I recognized most readily.
The rite did not collapse under the weight of my life. It grounded it. It met me exactly where faith and therapy faltered—not at the point of improvement, but at the point of truth.
What stayed with me from that cold New England night was not the gesture itself but the register it still carries. It begins where other systems avert their eyes: with human limitation, asserted without apology or rescue. “Remember that you are dust” is not despairing; it is simply accurate. We confront the creatureliness we spend our lives avoiding—even in the pew and the consulting room. It speaks beneath doctrine and diagnosis.
It speaks from a place far older than Freud, and even older than theology. It does not interpret our condition. It reveals it. It strips away the gentler stories we tell about our becoming and articulates, without flattery: We sin persistently. Much of what breaks in a life stays broken. And then we are gone.
The older I’ve grown, and the closer I’ve come to recognizing the limits of my own capacities, the more I’ve come to see that Ash Wednesday’s starkness is its strength. It does not demand a narrative of progress or pretend that I have one. It does not promise repair. It simply speaks what most of us work very hard not to hear.
In the ruins of my own life, it is only from that ground that I can hear the Church at all. Not from the angels or the saints. From the ashes.
The thumbprint fades. The truth does not.
For three pontificates now, my inclination has been toward Catholicism. Not for what it promises in the next world, but for what it offers in this one: universality, realism, a refusal to bend to my preferences. The mess I’ve made of my life poses obstacles to participation, obstacles that require canonical remedy alongside “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” And yet the ache of family estrangement has given the idea of God as father and Church as mother a primal pull. She guards her sacraments with care, insisting on intention and assent, but she scatters small graces widely. Ash Wednesday is one of them: no prerequisites, no proof, no worthiness exam.
It is the one moment in the year that does not ask me to assemble myself first. I cannot shake the sense that something foundational in me is perpetually out of tune, the part that neither faith nor therapy has ever coaxed into harmony. But the rite does not diagnose or accuse. It simply offers repentance and belief as a command that feels more like an invitation.
When the ashes touch my skin now, I bow a little lower. The priest speaks a sentence older than our explanations. Before grace, before healing, before change, there is this recognition of what we are. And after so many failed attempts at coherence—so many half-believed catechisms—that acknowledgement feels, at last, like mercy.
“Remember that you are dust” does not condemn. It clears the ground. And in that moment, for reasons I may never fully understand, I find I can hear God.
No comments:
Post a Comment