“Mourning and penitence.”

In its brief entry on Ash Wednesday[i], the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church uses these descriptive terms regarding the purpose of the day that begins Lent, the season of forty days culminating with Easter.

For many Christians, the day is marked (literally!) by ashes imposed on the forehead. Lent is a time for reflection and letting go. Ash Wednesday sets the mood, and it is a lowing minor key introduction. The liturgy and ritual declare none of us are exempt or above the leveling and lowering of death. We have Christ alone who will accompany us on that journey as we prepare to recall his fateful last days in Jerusalem. Using the palm fronds retained from the prior year’s Palm Sunday, these charred remnants of a prior Holy Week’s triumphal beginning serve as a humbling guide for those who follow the Resurrected One from hosannah to crucifixion to tomb, and then to the Alleluia, but only after all this has been remembered.

From dust we rise and back to dust we decay. The stakes are indeed high. Never discount this knowledge, so that you may live. 

In keeping that faith, how else better to engage this understanding than by honoring the need for mourning and penitence? Both activities bring a much different energy and experience than the world’s seductive call to find the highs of power, surety, and fame. Mourning asks us to linger over the heaviness of the world as it is. Penitence ensures we only bring our better, more sobered self before God.

After the past year, I feel the need for mourning and penitence more keenly personally and communally. We have experienced multi-faceted challenges, with disturbing and disruptive turns along the way. On the previous Ash Wednesday (February 26, 2020), we could scarcely imagine how Lent (and the month of March) would seem endless by the time we got to our limited in-person, social distancing, or virtual worship services on Easter Sunday. 

Even then, many pastoral friends joked well into the summer that we were still waiting for Lent to get over. We observed Easter in April 2020, yet long after, we lingered in “the valley of the shadow” as a pandemic schooled us in the hazards of wishful thinking and some unsettling times when other public good challenges arose: manifestations of the racism shaping our nation’s history (since 1619), entrenched socio-economic disparities that sharpen when a nation and economy in crisis unveils the gulfs and rifts, and a narcissism in politics that clouded strategy and response.

Last year’s Lent began a long season of learning to pivot, reorganize, argue, and grieve. Some churches hoped that the upswing in this new “COVID-19” epidemic would be well forgotten, a problem for big cities or overseas, but surely not in our midst with the same need for vigilance and sacrificing our “norms.” I will never forget the hopeful wish that “surely by Easter, we’ll be back in the building.”   

I counted myself among you. I did not think we would be still on this journey, just over a year now after the first COVID-19 case was identified in the state of Washington. I found myself lost for words as Seattle, then the greater New York City area, become epicenters. As I now launder my collection of face masks every Sunday evening, I say a prayer that more folks will embrace the necessity and consistency of mask-wearing and other precautions, as many remain resistant even with more than 400,000 fellow Americans now dead from contracting the disease. I wear my mask faithfully, not only for personal safety but for the sake of others. 

A measure of mourning and penitence would be well in order. To mourn means to recognize the loss and to give grief its due. Penitence would connect us with the hard questions of personal responsibility and ask us to examine what we really believe the social fabric of our nation and neighborhoods is all about.  

For Ash Wednesday 2021, when even gathering for in-person worship is a matter of caution and clergy have been debating if, let alone how, one might safely impose ashes, could we make space in such rituals to feel the heaviness of a year now past in our Lenten disciplines and reflection?   If we keep our personal piety disconnected from our global and national problems, are we truly learning the ways of mourning and penitence?

In addition to reading the Bible or devotional materials, can we also take up the practice of reading about the problems of our civic past? For U.S. Christians, Ash Wednesday’s moveable date (due to the calculation when Easter falls each year) lines up with a date in February or March, when more recent convention would have the observations of Black History Month and Women’s History Month take place. Checking with your local library for local recommendation lists or bibliographies will guide you into discussions of a past in need of mourning and penitence.   

In a time where we are entering into a Lenten season that will reflect a year’s worth of schooling in the full ferocity of a world where norms and givens have shattered, where the inequities long among us remain mostly unquestioned and far from dismantled, perhaps it is time to have our sense of self questioned and look long and hard at who we are before God and neighbor alike.