Ash Wednesday

Editorial for the CTS Prophet

Colliding Thoughts in the First Week of Lent

Ash Wednesday, 2004. My colleagues and I with the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq began a Lenten fast and public vigil in the middle of Baghdad. We held poster-size photos of the Iraqi citizens we knew had ‘disappeared’ in U.S. custody. We told their stories and the stories of countless other Iraqi prisoners and their families to anyone who would listen. It was the only thing left we could think to do to make anyone care. All our months of investigation, our reports, our appeals to U.S. Congresspersons and the U.S. media had fallen on deaf ears. We did not know that several weeks later, a soldier would himself produce the photos that would mean no one could deny any longer the reality of Abu Ghraib.

Within the week, I would be witness to a massive suicide bombing, at the Khadimiya Shi’a shrine in Baghdad, on the Shi’a festival of Ashura--commemo-rating the martyrdom of Hussein, grandson of Moham-med. I remember the bodies everywhere. I remember the three-story high spray of blood on the gates of the shrine. I remember the high-pitched cry of a man in the minarret crying, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ --God is greater, greater beyond all this.

Ash Wednesdays, and Lenten seasons, have become seasons of remembering. For me they are filled with anniversary dates of friends killed or taken hostage and carnage witnessed; of bombing campaigns and tank invasions; of waiting in bomb shelters or the safety of friend’s homes for lethal force to pass. It is a season for me marked with the colors of red and black: Ashes on foreheads and wine poured in Eucharist. Smoke in the air and blood in the streets.

Lent has become a season of being desperate for the sanctuary of worship space--whether traveling for hours over the back roads to the church in Jerusalem during a siege of the West Bank, or walking two blocks in Baghdad during the start of the hostage crisis to St. Rafael’s on Sunday afternoon, or as a safe zone last year in a different seminary, where the days were too often filled with pain and fear as well.

But, now we return to our prime-time programming: I caught the latest episode of ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ the drama about medical students on residency. This time the students were haphazardly practicing their triage skills when they are suddenly called to respond to a disaster--with their little emergency kits and seemingly little preparation, they get in the ambulances and race to the scene. A ferry, full of passengers, has crashed. Bodies everywhere. Smoke in the air and blood in the streets. High-pitched cries of those who don’t know what else to do. The rest of the show followed each one as they tried to survive and make decisions in the face of overwhelming events--and what in that mess be-came most important, the human connections.

It got me thinking.

The next day I went to our first-year students’ retreat and heard friends admitting the strain of this spring term already, feeling unprepared to meet the demands, feeling like fall term was so easy in comparison. Similarly, in the last Academic Council I heard faculty members overwhelmed with the sheer number of tasks to complete in the coming weeks.

How often have I felt ill-equipped and ill-prepared in the face of overwhelming events, uncertain of the future? How often have you?

Somehow these disjointed thoughts and parts of life come together at Lent. At least this is what I believe.

Ash Wednesday is a time and ritual of confession--of our own weaknesses, our bewilderment, our limita-tions, our recognition of our own mortality. It is a time of remembering the stories of our faith. It is a ritual of receiving God’s grace and wearing the marks of peni-tence on our foreheads. It ushers in the season of Lent--a season of reflection, discipline, waiting, and preparation. Who knows what we shall be called upon to do? Can we meet the demands of our lives and the calling of our faith even a fraction as well as the One who went to meet the cross? Or can we at least take comfort in knowing the One who met the cross loves us regardless of how inadequate we feel?

This is our time and season, given to us as God’s gift. Wherever we are and whatever lies before us between now and our Resurrection-times, it is for us. It is a gift of time to remember and to mourn. It gives us space to breathe and heal and be made whole.

Peace,
Le Anne