Get on your mark. Get set. Go!
Get on your mark (the ashes and the cross). Get set (your mind and your heart on Lent). Go (with the flow of God’s grace for 40 days).
The ashes are a unspoken and obvious statement about who you are and to whom you belong.
Get on your mark. Get set. Go!
In addition to not eating any bread during Lent, I am going to try to fast from worry.
On the Fridays of Lent, when I am abstaining from meat, I will do my best to “abstain” from worrying about the one thing that worries me most on that day. That one thing that I am worrying about most or that worries me most on that Friday – I will abstain from that one big worry, while I am abstaining from meat. I am just not going to worry about it, just as I am not going to eat goetta or a hamburger. No meat and no worry on Fridays.
On every other Lenten day, I am going to try to “fast” from worry. In a playful spirit, following the customary guidelines for fasting from food, I will allow myself to worry once a day for a reasonable amount of time, and then to worry for two other shorter periods of time which together will not equal that one, main reasonable amount of time – and, of course, there will be no snacking on worry in between.
This may sound silly, unless you have a tendency to worry like I do, which takes a lot of trust out of life as well as a lot of joy and enjoyment. Maybe I’ll be able to give the worry to God, and be done with it. Maybe I’ll just wind up putting it aside until Easter, when I’ll gorge myself on worry, after fasting from worry for so long. We’ll see.
In any case, Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) was quite the day: I worried all day long about as many things as I could think to worry about, hoping that beginning today, Ash Wednesday, God does something new with me.
You have your own favorite Ash Wednesday story, no doubt. Mine involves a city Metro bus. In any town, on Main Street is a good place for a Catholic church to be. There are multiple advantages: presence, curb appeal, access, visibility, passing traffic – all those and more. Add on the relaxed nature of the small town of Milford, and the location of St. Andrew is about as good as it can get.
Anyway, on to my Ash Wednesday story. Standing near the sidewalk outside church after the noon Mass on Ash Wednesday, I heard a voice. It was coming out of an open window by the driver’s seat of the city Metro bus #28, “Hey, Father!” He had stopped the bus, and the traffic behind him, right in front of church, in the eastbound lane.
As I stepped off the curb, the traffic in the westbound lane stopped, too. I got to the bus and was standing on the double yellow line in my purple vestments, as he continued, “It’s Ash Wednesday, and I can’t get to Mass today.” I didn’t have the ashes with me, but … instinctively (and playfully) I reached to my forehead, wiped off my ashes with my finger, and reached toward his head hanging out the window, “Remember that you are dust. Get moving!”
He was as pleased as could be as he drove off, as were the people in the cars and trucks behind him when he started moving again. Thankfully, no one else expected a drive-through imposition of ashes.
Yes, I know that for him the distribution and reception of ashes was not preceded by an appropriate Liturgy of the Word, but Jesus might say, “The ashes are made for man, not man for the ashes.”
With Open Doors 