Ashes

For Corein, some thoughts on hope, Ash Wednesday, and Lent

***

When I was 18, my AP English teacher--perhaps the adult I admired most--dropped the equivalent of a literary time bomb into my hands.

To this day I remember, with a cinematic amount of clarity, the three most important novels I've ever read. They were all novels he made me read and were novels that he told me would change my life. He was, of course, right. To this day I can remember lying in the grass of my parent's backyard and lazily finishing The Great Gatsby and feeling, for the first time, that I wanted To Be a Writer. I can remember the hum of my old dorm fridge as I curled in my favorite flowered armchair my second year in college and deciding that if I ever had I daughter I would name her Frances after Franny Glass's character. I remember being 18, angsty, looking forward to the conclusion of high school and leaving for college in the fall.

My AP teacher truly had a gift for understanding adolescents. In what I largely consider one of the greatest teaching decisions ever made, he gave a group of affluent suburban kids The Great Gatsby to study. And we talked at length about materialism and longing; greed and spiritual shallowness. As a relatively lower-middle-class kid in a school where 17-year olds drove BWM's and Audi's, Gatsby fascinated and repelled me. Fitzgerald's prose made me realize, finally, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing. Jay Gatsby scared me into discovering that I didn't want only wealth, possessions, notoriety. For four years I had watched the students around me get $400 prom dresses and expensive cars and thought that it was what I wanted. Gatsby forced me to think about wanting something else.

But the brilliance of this particular teaching decision is twofold. First, Gatsby. Second, Larry Darrell.

Larry is the protagonist of a largely under-appreciated novel by W.S. Maugham, The Razor's Edge. Outside of those of us who took AP English, I haven't run across many people who've read the book. I'll spare you an entire synopsis of the plot. Suffice it to say, it is one young man's quest for wisdom and spiritual fulfillment after WWI, costs be damned. It is a very ordinary little novel; certainly, Maugham's prose has nothing of Fitzgerald. But unlike The Great Gatsby it is a novel that haunts me not because of its style but because of its characters. It is earnest in a way that reminds you of every (sober) conversation you ever had after 2:00 AM in someone's dorm room, when questions of morals, ethics, and God all took on a kind of monumental importance. It's that kind of novel. It appealed tremendously to my 18-year old self. I was nothing if not earnest and was, more often than not painfully, sincere in that way you only seem to be during your adolescence.

***

I find myself missing Lent. I woke up yesterday with an inexpressible longing to go to church--to go to Catholic Church, actually and receive my ashes. It went so far that I actually called the local Cathedral and asked about distribution of ashes and mass. Then I saw one of those news stories that reminds me why I gave up Christianity, to say nothing of Roman Catholicism. 

I still miss Lent. 

I always liked Lent. I like any holiday that makes you stop and take stock of where you've been, where you are, where you want to be. I liked that, in a culture of indulgence and instant-gratification, there was still this tiny space where restraint and simplicity were held up as virtues. Where we were asked to take a long, hard look at ourselves and decide what is keeping us from spiritual progression. 

I've particularly always liked Ash Wednesday. As a Christian, I think I was supposed to find Easter the most meaningful. Afterall, what is death with the promise of Resurrection? But the outward symbols of Ash Wednesday, the external reminders of our own impermanence (remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return) and the subsequent examination of what in your brief life is important and what is expendable has always appealed to me. 

This is what I miss when I say that I miss Lent. When I chucked Christ's Resurrection by the wayside, I inadvertently chucked the possibility of my own resurrection--at least, as far as I've always understood it--along with it. And so, on a day where many of my friends are thinking about death and the resurrection I find myself just thinking about death.

It's less gloomy than it sounds, actually. Perhaps "thinking about death" isn't quite the right way to express it. I find myself thinking about impermanence. About what is important in this life. About what I want from life and who I want to be. This year, without the Resurrection to look forward to, without the assured promise of a tomorrow, I find that I am more interested in my actions right now. It's related to what I said two weeks ago in my post about grace and wanting to participate in my own salvation. I want my good deeds to count for something, and I want the life I lead in this world to count for something. Since I've decided to put the Resurrection on the shelf, such as it is, I find myself more preoccupied with figuring out how I want my life to matter here and now.

I feel a little closer to that 18 year old who was so moved by Larry Darrell and his quest for understanding and peace. It's funny. I've spent the past ten years trying to become more educated, cultivated, and worldly. The only thing I've become is less sincere. Somewhere in the process of growing up, I managed to forget that the life I was striving for wasn't exactly what I had set out to achieve. And of course, no one is the person they wanted to be when they were 18. You make choices and they have consequences. You compromise and rethink positions and sometimes you change for the better. And sometimes you look up from your mountain of work and social obligations, tests and oil changes, trips to the grocery store and fights with the guy you're dating and wonder "how in the hell did I get here?"

When I was 18 I marked heavily in my books. In my copy of The Razor's Edge this passage was the most heavily marked. It is one that I find running through my mind, today, when Christians everywhere are called to think of impermanence.

If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

I cannot, nor do I want to be the same person I was at 18. I've changed, and for the most part I am grateful for those changes. But today, thinking about impermanence and yes, about death, I can't help but long for the sincerity, for the earnestness I once had. I can't help but feel like they're here, somewhere, beneath the detritus of work and a life post-graduate school, underneath the piles of decisions and consequences and compromises and that if I am just patient enough, I'll be able to find them again. And that if I do, my own imperfect, impermanent life will be all the richer for having them back.

Lead Me Home

On New Year's Eve I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car, sniffling with my fourth cold of the year and listening to my chauffeur for the evening talk about how she missed religious Sundays. This woman is one of my oldest and dearest friends and quit Roman Catholicism while I was still trying to find a way that combined "radical feminist and egalitarian" with "a hierarchy that uses flawed theology to mask its fear and mistrust of women." Needless to say, I've stopped making the attempt to reconcile the two.

The conversation was a soothing one. We both confessed that our Secular Sundays lacked a sense of community and a sense of purpose and belonging that our weeks had when we were both practicing Christians. It may be the result of years of indoctrination in a particular faith, but we both agreed that our Sundays were lacking depth. However, we both also agreed that returning to Christian churches, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, was an impossibility. That ground has been pretty well razed and salted. We eventually arrived at our destination and put an end to the conversation.

She's departed to finish an internship abroad and I'm left muddling through my own Sundays as best as I know how. Sundays generally include the Sunday New York Times, copious amounts of coffee, baking, cooking, and fiction reading. They're quiet and peaceful and have settled into a routine I truly enjoy. Lately, in addition to all of these things, my Sundays have included a playlist titled "Better than Church."

You see, despite giving up Roman Catholicism, Jesus, and feeling well on my way to giving up the idea of a personal God, I cannot drop Gospel music. I was never one for the organ-based hymns played at the church where I attended graduate school (this particular community could make "How Can I Keep from Singing" sound like a dirge) and I equally loathed anything that sounded like Christ-pop, but Gospel music has long been a part of my life.

As a theology student, I was passionately interested in grace, in the efficacy of the sacraments, and the mechanics of salvation. I thought of salvation as a kind of equation, something like: SALVATION=human sinfulness-Christ's sacrifice +the sacraments+(good deeds+living the faith(?)) I was told many times that salvation was a mystery explained (somehow) by Christ's willingness to be tortured to death, but I was always a little confused by the argument. I arrogantly wanted to be a part of my own redemption, and not just because I participated in the sacraments or professed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I wanted the life I was trying to lead count for something--anything in that equation--regardless of whether or not I was a Christian. Even then I doubted my own sincerity when participating in the sacraments and wanted redemption, somehow, to not be wrapped up in my identity as a Christian.

Gospel music has always brought these questions of grace and redemption forward for me in a way that other religious music can't. I may be moved by the beauty of Mozart's Requiem Mass or repulsed by any religious music played on an electric guitar, but they never make me pause to consider my salvation. But even on my most secular mornings, hearing Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash sing "On the Far Side Banks of the Jordan" makes me long for some kind of certainty about my after life.

***

Driving home today Elvis's cover of Amazing Grace came on my radio. It's a fraught song for me and one that's part of my DNA, so to speak. I remember my maternal grandmother helping me to pick out the first notes of the song on her old piano. When she passed, I inherited both her piano and the songbook with the sheet music and the lyrics. I learned the words and the melody to the song long before I ever learned what they meant. It is a song that I can rarely hear without crying, partially because of family history and partially because the lyrics to the song are so powerful and something that I want to believe with every bit of me, but can't.  

I'd spent the weekend with graduate school friends, something that I always enjoy, but inevitably leads to some intense conversations about faith and how I've been doing. I wasn't particularly in a mood to think about redemption and I certainly was not in the mood to cry while driving down the highway. But ultimately, it was this particular version of the song that kept my hand from the seek button. It's a magnificent rendition of the song, and it had been awhile since I had heard it. 

Something happened this time. Instead of listening and hearing a message of love and redemption that felt like something I was excluded from, I listened with a strange kind of calmness. I didn't think about Church or salvation or heaven and how in the hell I'm going to get there as a skeptic. I thought about the generosity and love in the people I had just left. I thought about my grandmother and the fact that I can't sit down at my piano without remembering her fondly. I thought about my family and my best friend and the gift of a place that is finally beginning to feel like home.

When the song ended I realized that I am not comfortable calling these things grace. That word is still a complicated one for me, still wrapped up in a conception of redemption and salvation that require an equation to be explained. But despite not knowing what to call these things, on this particular Sunday, they managed to balance the equation and give a little more weight to the day.

For the time being, that may be grace enough.