Lisa’s note: Last I checked, not even Amazon.com had posted any internal content for Craving Grace. Also, today is Ash Wednesday. This means: today’s post is timely and also a first. Below is an actual excerpt from my new book, verbatim and with only one sneaky marketing omission. (The two portions in brackets are notes added for clarity.) Come May 1st, you can find the whole story in chapter five. Enjoy!
To Ashes
Ash Wednesday, though a noted date on the traditional Church calendar, is not formally observed by many evangelical churches. In my West Michigan neck of the woods, for instance, most Christians think this day is for Catholic types only. Most of us grew up without knowing what Ash Wednesday is about. We’ve never practiced it, and we have no problem finding it odd and a little creepy.
Before Mars Hill [then my local church and my employer] became part of my life, my only formal experiences with the Church calendar had been the more or less standard observances: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter. Sometimes not even Advent and Lent. None of the churches I had been part of in the past had been big on liturgy—when it came to practicing sacred rites and rituals, we were willing to light purple and pink candles around Christmastime each year, but that was typically as wild as we got.
Me on Ash Wednesday a few years ago.
There is a practice on Ash Wednesday called the giving and receiving of the ashes. Traditionally the ashes are burned fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday—those who come to receive the ashes expect to have that fine, gritty palm dust put on their foreheads. They wear it all day in the shape of a cross, given in two small smudges by someone else’s ash-covered thumb. This is a way of remembering and mourning. We remember Christ’s time of temptation in the wilderness and we mourn his death. And we remember and mourn our own dying: the fact that death and sinfulness rule us finally, that even at our best we are full of the deceit and ingratitude and arrogance and self-motives that put holiness on our own strength permanently out of reach. It is a fine, gritty reality.
