Ash Wednesday and the comfort of death

I think a lot about babies and death. Maybe because all mine have died.

Ash Wednesday this year was particularly comforting, as we sat in a cavernous church in the middle of a 9-million person city and watched streams of people come forward to be told, ‘remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ The man in the wheelchair brought forward by his friends, the elderly woman in her fur coat, the business man on his way home from work and the young man on his way to the gym. The little blonde girl with her doll tucked under her arm and her toddler brother held by their mother. The homeless man and the lady lacking touch with reality. The widows and brides, the priests and altar boys, the newborns and octogenarians, all marked with the sign of death. All marked with the sign of life.  

In a hundred years, all of us dead, all of us dust.

In a hundred years, all of us (please God) more alive than we ever can be now.

Several years ago, Ash Wednesday saw me riding the London tube with a giant ash cross on my forehead. I had forgotten the mark, but saw two women whispering as they looked at me. Finally the younger one mustered her British courage to pose a personal question to a complete stranger. “Can I ask what that is on your forehead?” she inquired curiously.

A decade of theological studies does not prepare you for pithy tube evangelisation. I burst out with the first thing I could grab from the files of tradition and scripture scrolling madly through my mind: “it’s a cross,” I offered. “Today is Ash Wednesday. Christians all over the world get crosses on their foreheads - it’s a reminder that we’re all going to die someday.”

I said it with a smile and every ounce of normalcy I could muster as I realized how bizarre it must sound to someone on the outside. (I have a vague sense that the smile might have done more good than my words.)

What kind of person wears a mark of death on their forehead and smiles about it?

Most people don’t find death comforting. I never did. But when the people you love begin to die, you want to be close to them.

I think of it as a mercy that we’re all facing death together. It might not come at the same moment, but for all of us, the moment is inevitable. Surely that moment becomes easier when we know that our dear ones are waiting for us just on the other side of a breath. 

“So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners,” writes St. Paul to the Ephesians, “but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you are also being built together into a dwelling place of God in the spirit.”

These words were proclaimed at our wedding, chosen to remind my husband and me that as tempting as it was to think that our marriage was all about us, it in fact was a gift from God to bring us deeper into fellowship with the Body of Christ, here and in eternity.

We did not know then that God’s Providence would grow that Body to include the fellow citizens of our children preceding us into eternity.

The Body of Christ grew through my body, creaking and stretching to welcome new members of the household of God.

The Body of Christ grew through my body, broken and cracked open to send them on to God’s own dwelling place. 

When someone new in all the universe comes into existence inside your body, it changes you. The flash of light that scientists tell us happens at conception? Surely it happened in me, an echo of and participation in God’s own creative words in Genesis: “Let there be light.”

When someone you love enters eternity from inside your body, it changes you. The light of warmth and goodness that those with near-death experiences describe? Surely my children saw it inside me, a foretaste and of that place where they will “need neither lamplight nor sunlight, for the Lord their God will be shining on them.”

It does not matter that some lived only days; they now exist forever.

And the ticket to seeing them again? Our old friend, death. Death is no longer such a stranger when it has come in you but not for you. 

Only that’s not quite right. Rather as St. Therese says, “It is not Death that will come to fetch me, it is the good God. Death is no phantom, no horrible specter. I am not afraid of a separation which will unite me to the good God forever.”

The ashen cross we wear boldly is not only a reminder of our temporal end, but a proclamation that it is nothing to fear if we live as though we truly are marked, body and soul, by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. 

St. Paul claims to carry in his body the marks of Christ. Have not our children given us that gift, too? Do not life and death and resurrection live in us? Do we not now await His return with an eagerness previously impossible?

When you have buried the bodies of your children, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust” suddenly becomes a relief. This life is not an interminable separation from our loved ones. One day our end will come. Others will lay our bodies to rest in that earth that God originally fashioned us from. We will join our fellow citizens in the household of God, no longer crowding forward for an ashen cross but a crown of glory.

Someday, a trumpet blast will sound. Perhaps there will be another flash of light as heaven and earth are recreated. Our ashes and dust will be resurrected so that all of us, dead or alive, can arrive with unveiled faces to the wedding feast of the lamb.