Table Scraps: February 2009

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I don’t really need to hear that reminder. And I sure don’t want to hear it.

I know it’s Ash Wednesday, the day on which many Christians impose a cruciform smudge of incinerated palm leaf on each other’s brow and proclaim, “This is you, buddy!” Truthfully, I am already quite aware of my own mortality, thank you. Every single day imposes its own reminders aplenty.

Within any given 24-hour span I am haunted by my shortcomings and confronted by my failures. I am frustrated by my inability to keep promises or establish commitments or keep up at work or be the sort of husband, dad, or friend that I really want to be. These and their siblings smudge me and mark me as mortal. Every gray hair, lost opportunity, impulsive bad decision, each aching knee, sniffle and cough and broken relationship cry out my dusty origins and dustier destiny in nagging, niggling, sing-songy unison.

No, I really don’t think I need the smudge and the words imposed, as if to hammer home something that I have somehow forgotten or to etch it indelibly like some permanent thumb and finger angled to an “L” on my forehead to proclaim: “LOSER!” I don’t need an unwelcome outward sign of the inward reality that confronts me – and with which I struggle – every single day.

Here’s what I do need, though, what I crave in the dusty depths of my soul, what I’d welcome as I try to lean into Lent and spring and lengthening days: the mark of someone who will embrace my stumbling humanity, won’t hold my mortality against me, will receive it as gift and help me welcome it and steward it better than I do.

Of course, I’m not looking for some sort of “I’m okay, you’re okay” overlook of what I am and do that is destructive or unhealthy or irresponsible or hurtful.

I am looking for some sign of forgiveness, a reminder that it’s okay not to be God, a marked assurance that, as for Adam and Eve before me, divine breath brings dirt to life. I guess, as it turns out, I really yearn to have Jesus etched on my furrowed brow – dead, entombed in dust, standing again in that earth-scented garden. I need, desperately, that cruciform smudge of ash, promise of life from death, hope enveloping despair, new beginnings following mortal mistakes. And I need to hear in the “remember…” the promise, the hope, the new beginning that draw me toward Easter.

Even as we live each day, death our life embraces.
Who is there to bring us help, rich, forgiving graces?
You only, Lord, you only!
Baptized in Christ’s life-giving flood;
Water and his precious blood.
Holy and righteous God, Holy and mighty God,
Holy and all-merciful Savior, Everlasting God,
By grace bring us safely through the flood of bitter death.
Lord, have mercy.

(hymn text: Martin Luther, as found in Lutheran Book of Worship © 1978)

This morning it was a few degrees below zero in Indianapolis. We are supposed to hit fifty on Saturday.

Freeze. Thaw. Snow. Rain. Winter. Spring. Lent. Easter. Death. Resurrection.

We find ourselves caught up in and moving toward interesting rhythms this time of year, don’t we? Of course, most of our focus tends to be on the daily stuff, the little things that dominate our days. It can be challenging to lift or deepen our focus a bit and see the bigger, even cosmic, rhythms that throb like imperceptible bass lines beneath the quotidian.

Oops. How did that archaic word slip in? Quotidian? Dictionaries say that the word means “occurring every day” or “commonplace” or “ordinary.” Author and poet Kathleen Norris connects this word with another old one, “mystic,” behind which is another word that’s often absent from contemporary vocabulary, “mystery.”

Perhaps our most valuable mystics are those of the quotidian....They search for God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people, and duties that can submerge the self.
Norris enlists Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that feisty founder of an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany, to draw our attention to the profound reality lurking in, with and under the everyday stuff of our lives.

We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for the daily gifts….How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?
The ancient voice of the prophet Isaiah also echoes through the centuries to chime in on God’s behalf: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Sometimes the details of the day are just that, details of the day. But most often, just beneath their surface a deeper reality moves, waiting to spring forth and use drudgery, demands and details to connect us to each other and to the cosmic rhythms of sustaining, life-giving grace.

Let those who have eyes to see, see!