When you are not feeling very ashy...

Lent finally dropped today, as it is Ash Wednesday in the West. (Eastern Orthodoxy and many Eastern Catholic churches do Lent but do not really do Ash Wednesday.) For those of us in the West, Ash Wednesday kicks off what I humorously refer to as the "Season of Church Music in a Minor Key" as it seems like we transition to a season of penitence and fasting, where even the liturgy is fasting from anything other than funeral dirges in discordant minor musical notation. Lots of flats and ending verses on something that sounds like a major motion picture film soundtrack when the villain appears. 

I exaggerate. A bit. Not all music in liturgical churches for the next several weeks are all in B minor. Some churches still throw in some normal hymnology, at least in part. Of course, the liturgy of our Protestant brethren who don't do Lent at all is pretty much "all systems normal"-whatever that means in Megachurch Protestant worship these days. They may well have already jumped to Easter already. Certainly, Easter chicks, baskets, and bunnies are already all over stores like Walmart, though I am pretty sure they just took the leftover Valentine's candy and shoved them into Easter baskets. I mean, if it is going to be stale by Easter, does it really matter if it's 6 or 10 weeks stale by that point? 

On years like this when Easter falls so early (this year, Easter is the first weekend in April!), it can seem like we just tossed out the last of the dried up Christmas poinsettias last week. Ash Wednesday can be pretty jarring in years like this, more so that it normally is. Lent is never particularly "fun" but at least we have a little more liturgical time to prepare ourselves for it. 

Speaking for myself here, I have to admit I am not at all feeling "ashy" today on Ash Wednesday. It used to be one of my favorite liturgical days of the year, oddly enough. I found the imposition of Ashes when I was an Anglican priest to be a very meaningful liturgy because it was one of the few liturgies of the year that literally allowed me to get my hands dirty. Being from a blue collar background where I grew up on a construction site, Ash Wednesday was a day I looked forward to as a liturgist. 

This was partly because it was always fun to have some of the children of the parish in church school help me make the ashes. The ashes used are usually from the burned up palm leaves from the previous Lent. People often take the palms home after the Palm Sunday liturgy and make crosses with them or adorn their homes with them. As they are sacramental objects, most people save them out of respect and bring them to church the next year to be turned into either the ashes for Ash Wednesday or to be burned as part of the Pascal fire on the Easter Vigil. I always hear in my head the voice of James Earl Jones from the Lion King, in that the life of the liturgical palm must always "take its part in the great circle of (liturgical) life."

As I am no longer an Anglican minister who has those sacramental and liturgical duties, Ash Wednesday has gone from one of the most meaningful liturgies of the Church calendar to one of the ones I most dread. 

I paused for several minutes as I was typing that previous sentence in the last paragraph to choose what word would most adequately described my gut reaction to the Ash Wednesday liturgy now. I initially wrote "dislike" and then changed it to "disdain." Neither of those were at all correct. "Dread" is probably not the most accurate word either. I don't fear it, as much as it is something that often stops me in my tracks. I use it in the way persons in the 1600s would refer to a 'dread spectre' because Ash Wednesday is to me a form of a liturgical dread spectre. 

 What is a spectre, you might ask? The term still exists in modern English. It was even the title of a relatively recent James Bond film. The modern usage has basically become a fancy pants way of referring to a ghost or disembodied soul. I was surprised when I looked up the word on various online dictionaries, that the term "spectre" had become so preternaturally secularized that the primary definition on more than one online dictionary defined it not primarily as a ghost or phantasm but "a mental representation of some haunting experience." It has come to be used as a way not to describe an entity outside your body like a spirit but as to describe from sort of psychological mind trick where your brain turns a past traumatic event into a real, visible nightmare. 

Originally, though, a spectre was a spiritual being or entity of some kind. It was not a demon or an angel. It wasn't a "lady in white" Victorian type of ghost. The concept of ghosts as we would commonly picture them from modern horror films really did not exist before the late 1700s when the Gothic Horror genre really began to become a specific literary genre. A spectre was a more ethereal form of entity. 

What people from the 1500s and 1600s meant by spectre is still somewhat elusive, but we do know they took them very seriously. Common Law in England even had a very extensive way of introducing what was called "spectral evidence" into Courts of Law. A spectre could almost be treated as a primary witness in a trial. That may seem all oogie boogie medieval nonsense, but there were precise and extensive rules of evidence and procedure for admitting "spectral evidence" into a Common Law trial or proceeding. You saw this extensively in odd "Witch Trial" cases in places like Salem, Massachusetts, and Bury-St. Edmunds in England in the 1600s.    

This is one of the true horrors of events like the Salem Witch Trials. It is very tempting for us to write off such witch trials as Medieval nonsense, mass hysteria, and juridical farces, but people like the Puritans who were running the Witch Trials were not simply backwards hysterical lynch mobs burning poor old women who happened to have a wart on their nose as witches. They were on one level extremely obsessed with following all the rules of Civil Procedure and Common Law in terms of admitting evidence and witnesses. Even someone as astute a mind as Cotton Mather, who was a Harvard educated, highly educated and respected clergyman and theologian, got sucked into defending the Witch Trials in Salem at the time because he was convinced that the Common Law system truly applied always brought justice to the Crown. One can follow the letter of the law with all the current legal doctrines and procedures and still end up with grave injustice. But, I digress...

My point is that Ash Wednesday is to me that sort of dread spectre. Maybe the modern definition of spectre is correct, after all, and this is a machination of my brain transforming a sad point of my life into the form of a dread spectre. Spectre does come from the same root as "spectrum"-as in something that is on the very edge of perceived reality. Like the last note of a very high pitched hum that if it goes up another few pitches, the human ear can no longer hear it. It's there, but past all normal human ability to perceive it.   

I guess that is where I am with Ash Wednesday. I am just not feeling very ashy these days. The beauty of the words 'remember you are dust, and the dust you shall return' is a spectre on the verge of my perception. If it were any higher pitched, I would not hear the sound at all. When Ash Wednesday borders on being a dog whistle that cannot be heard by mortal ears, what does one do?  

Perhaps the answer lies in the great Charles Dickens. Thought a Christmas story, A Christmas Carol has some Lenten themes as well. In one passage, when Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Dickens gives us this great passage:

“Ghost of the Future!” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.

“Lead on!” said Scrooge. “Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!” 

There is a little line about this dread spectre that is overlooked in virtually every on screen depiction I have seen of A Christmas Carol. I place it in bold here for emphasis:

"...Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”

The kind hand trembled.

One never thinks of the Ghost of Christmas Future as kind, but that is the very word Dickens uses near the end of Scrooge's encounter. 

One must remember that Ash Wednesday is like a spectre. Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, it may seem a dread phantom, but it walks with us. It is something on the edge of our perception but a few days ago, and yet here it is, facing us as it approaches us like mist long the ground. Upon meeting us, Ash Wednesday beckons us onward. Not to do us harm, but to do us good because it is kind. The spectre is our companion along the way. It comes to greet us in its own dread way. 

It reminds us that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. 

But those are kind words. 

They warn of our eventual end. They remind us that one day our names may be written on some stone somewhere. 

But they are kind words, because we still have time. 

They remind us to prepare for and to honor Easter, and try to keep it all the year. 

The spectre reminds us to live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. 

The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me, so that when the dread spectre of Ash Wednesday comes to take us home in our final hour, the kind, trembling hand we find holding ours at the last, is that of Jesus himself.