On the Edge of Ashes

Last year's Hosanna's have gone.  Palm branches have been burned and what is left resides in a small container no larger than my hand.  The ashes, the dark, smudgy ashes are ready for marking.  But what do they mark, really?  What do they remind us of?  Why do so many in the world chose to have this mark imposed on them?

DIRT

These sooty ashes are applied with the words "You are dust and to dust you will return", and so they remind us of our earthiness.  They speak of our mortality, for we shall return to dust, but they also remind us of our humanity.  They whisper the ancient story of a God who fashions creatures out of soil.  These ashes remind us of our beginnings and endings, ans so teach us to number well our days.

LIVE

Yes, they may remind us that someday we may die, but they shout at us to live!  To live, not in sin, but in new life.  To not get stuck but to walk toward something (or Someone) with new practices.  These ashes beg us to live by letting go...or taking up some new action.  They cheer us on to life - not half-lived in mediocrity, but toward rigor, challenge, and a robust faith.

REPENTANCE

Ashes have long been a symbol for sorrow and grief.  These ashes remind us to take inventory of our lives, and in the ensuing sorrow, lead us to repentance.  The cross of ashes whispers what many in our world do not know:  there is freedom in serving only one Master.  Repentance becomes the door to transformation.

TRANSFORMATION

The ashes declare that transformation is possible, and we do not go it alone.  Through the renewing of our minds, through allowing God to change our psyche, a new person can emerge.  We are not left to ourselves in a fatalistic universe.  God has intervened and we can become new creatures!

PRAYER

The ashes also offer us an invitation to come and follow Jesus into the wilderness.  They invite us to fast and pray for 40 days.  Jesus, the Master, dis it and we are to follow Him.  These cinders invite us into a new kind of humanity that we find in Jesus.  A humanity who chooses the Father and His will over and above the screeching temptations of "take care of yourself", "prove yourself", and "indulge yourself with power".

Coming to the edge of ashes takes courage.  Will we allow them not to just mark our foreheads but our whole being as well?  Will we let them do their full 40-day work, even long after we've rubbed off their smudges?

"Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful.
Oh God let something essential happen to me, something awesome, something real.  Speak to my condition, Lord, and change me somewhere inside where it matters.
Let something happen which is my real self, Oh God."     (Ted Loder, Guerrillas of Grace)

Soup

Does a caterpillar know her destiny from the beginning?  Does she know the life she is born into will be shortened by an event that will both bind her and transform her at the same time?  For my part, I don't think the fuzzy creature has a clue.  If she did, she could not move in the world as a caterpillar.  Instead, she would be paralyzed by fear of what must come and she would vainly fight against inevitability.

Instead, the caterpillar goes about her caterpillar life.  She walks, learns to protect herself from predators and voraciously devours any plant life put in front of her.  And she grows - almost exponentially.  Driven by her eating habits, she consumes and consumes and swells larger, more voluminous by the day.  Preoccupied with eating and growing, what that caterpillar doesn't know is that just below the surface of her skin, there are thin, fragile structures forming.  Unaware of their existence, this anatomy resembling wings, antennae, and long legs remains dormant until their use will become necessity to her.  She, like any member of the animal kingdom, simply goes about her day learning - capturing experiences in her memory.  These recollections, so vital to her survival, embed themselves in her brain and form her reactions, decisions and her movements.  They fashion her story.

At some point, the eating, growing life of the caterpillar stops.  Does she choose it?  Does it "happen" to her?  Is there some biological countdown clock that, like a timer on a bomb, once it reaches zero, causes a cataclysmic, cascading chain of events?  I am not sure anyone can even answer those questions, but what we know for sure is, the caterpillar enters darkness.  A chrysalis is formed around her and great opaque doors clang shut - closing out light and life as she knew it.

Then, the waiting begins.

It was once thought the caterpillar completely died inside the chrysalis, or that she underwent a slow, gradual metamorphasis.  If the chrysalis was cut open during the process, so the logic went, we would find a half caterpillar, half butterfly mutation.  This however, is not the case.  Those useless structures the caterpillar hid unknowingly just beneath her skin roll up and hide against the side of the dark chrysalis cave.  And then rest of the caterpillar turns to soup.

Her body, her legs, her eyes, her everything...liquefies and the caterpillar ceases to be.  She dissolves.  And now, she must wait.  She must exist as soup...though all the DNA to form a butterfly floats about in the amalgamation.

Evidently, soup needs time.  Any sense of solid form must be abandoned and forgotten.  Is the transforming creature grateful for that chrysalis?  It causes the liquefying and promises only darkness, but at least provides a container - walls so the liquid doesn't spill out into nothingness.  This torture chamber at least holds the soupy mess together.

How long the soup lasts is unknown.  Perhaps some biological, cosmic clock begins another countdown.  Something begins to be formed inside the darkness.  The wing pieces, the antennae, and long legs, once useless, join the new creature and become an integral part of her new identity.  And, the funny thing is, it seems some of the memories and experiences from her former life make it through the soup too.  Yes, the caterpillar dissolved, but small pieces of her survived and are embedded in the body and mind of this new winged creature.

And so the butterfly emerges.  She is completely different from what she was , yet still carries pieces of who she used to be inside her.

The caterpillar's story is mine too.  I spent many years happy - devouring "food" in my local church.  I ate and ate...and grew and grew, until one day, the cosmic countdown reached zero.  Through a chain of events and a deeply felt betrayal, God built me a chrysalis and shoved me in.  In that dark place, I dissolved, turned to soup and waited.  

That place was both friend and foe.  It bound me, undid me, dissolved everything I thought I was.  So many times the squeezing of the walls was too tight, but it was the only solid sense of anything I had.  That dark chrysalis, as much as I hated it, was, at times, my only sense of God.  In the darkness, I floated with no concept of any direction.  I lost all labels.  I entered a churning confusion and anger that lasted years.

However, somewhere in the midst of the liquefied state, transformation was underway.  So minute, it could never be quantified.  The great Creator was doing what He always does - stringing amino acids into proteins into chains of DNA and creating new life out of soup.  Old memories were woven into new creation and useless structures of the past were now prominent, vital pieces of who I was to be.

At some point, the dark soup gives way to solidity and color, but it all happens in darkness.  The coming butterfly never sees the forming beauty.  All she knows is the tight dark hold of the chrysalis.

And so, I am learning to live again, transformed and new, yet carrying old memory.  I who once crawled am now called to fly.  She who endured darkness for years is invited into the light once more.  And my soul finds trepidation in it all.