New York Times Op-Ed: The Meaning of Lent to This Unchurched Christian, by Margaret Renkl; Author, Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (2021)):
On Wednesday, in Catholic parishes across the world, a priest will dip his thumb into a pot of ashes — the burned remains of blessed palms from last year’s Palm Sunday Mass — and smudge the sign of the cross on each congregant’s forehead. Performing this ancient ritual, he will murmur, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The priest will say these words on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, but he will not be saying these words to me.
I have had a troubled relationship with the church of my childhood since childhood itself, when I learned in Catholic school that I would never be allowed to become a priest. For decades, nevertheless, the gifts of my faith outweighed the pronouncements of the institutional church that I found alienating or enraging. Human institutions are inherently flawed, and I have always loved the rituals that linked me across time to so many others facing fear and loneliness and pain, to so many others finding solace in their faith.
Then the pandemic quarantines left me unchurched through no choice of my own, and the death of our last parent, for whom there would only ever be one church, left my husband and me free to make our own choices about where to worship. I came to understand that my growing feeling of spiritual alienation wasn’t temporary. I loved my parish, and I loved our brilliant, compassionate pastor, but I was done with the institutional church.
Still, I miss the community. I miss the singing. I miss serving in social justice ministries. I even miss the ashes.
Ash Wednesday isn’t a day for rebellion. It’s a day for fasting, reflection and prayer, a somber reminder that our lives are brief, our days running out. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The longer this pandemic drags on, the clearer those words become.
At 60, I am making peace with the dust to which I will return. For myself, at least — and only for myself — I don’t even mind the idea of mortality, for I have thrown in my lot with immortality. And isn’t the promise of immortality what Lent prepares us for? How will I make ready, now that I am without a church? What rituals will I observe, now that the Stations of the Cross no longer belong to me? …
[A]s a new member of the unchurched Christian faithful, what am I supposed to do with Lent? Surely there must be some spiritual practice that falls between a church-ordained ritual and a secular perfectibility project. …
I can continue to ponder, to be puzzled. I will almost certainly continue to feel just a little bit lost. I’ll look for a new church someday, a new place to put all this sorrow and a new community with whom to share it, but I’m not obliged to find that place just now. Ash Wednesday tells me only to keep trying: to believe, to be better, not to give up hope. And that’s faith enough for any season.
