The Stiffest Drink the Church Offers

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent that leads to Easter. For me it marks an anniversary of sorts.  Eighteen years ago, after being away from Christianity for a long time, Ash Wednesday was the day I found my way back.  After attending a service at a local Episcopal church (now my home parish), I remember thinking, “Well, whatever that was, it certainly wasn’t Christianity Lite.”  It was stately and solemn and ancient and included the feel-good message that I was going to die (that’s the way to pack ‘em into church!).

But it was Lent that brought me back, and in the years since then I have come to love the darkness and mystery of this season.  In doing so, I realize that Lent is not for everyone.  My husband calls it the stiffest drink the Church offers, and the more I think about that metaphor, the better I like it. Lent is like an aged Irish whiskey, complex and multi-layered.  It is an acquired taste, one appreciated more as one grows older.  It can be misused (too much emphasis on sin and not enough on renewal), but if one tries to gloss over it, as many Christians do, I think they’re missing something strong and bracing. Without it, Easter is a pale shadow of what it can be.

Around the world today, millions of people will go to an Ash Wednesday service and have a cross of ashes marked on their foreheads.  Traditionally, the ash comes from the palm fronds saved from the previous year’s Palm Sunday service.  The palms represent the adulation and praise of the world, reduced now to dust.  On Ash Wednesday we are reminded that the world and all it contains, including our own bodies, will in the end be nothing but dust.

So Ash Wednesday is a reminder of mortality, the Christian equivalent of Buddhists meditating in a graveyard. It is also an invitation for a six-week interior journey, one of self-examination and penitence. 

Here at The Holy Rover, we’re pouring a stiff Irish whiskey for everybody in the pub.  Care to join me in a wee dram?