Wholeness as a Balm: A Meditation on Ash Wednesday 2020
My father, a retired Lutheran minister, deceased in March of 2019, had a longtime conflict with Lutheran theology that, to his way of seeing it, overemphasized confession. He began to resist leading or saying the very Lutheran Confession of Sin. As best I could tell his reasoning ran that repeating the Confession of Sin weekly was not a positive thing because it diminished that we are “made new” by faith and lived out that life with many positive behaviors that should be celebrated, rather than confessing sin.
I thought of my father this Ash Wednesday, just over a year from his death. And it occurred to me that I think the reasoning he used for his rejection of this tradition, this ritual, was not based on right thinking (which it did seem to have a share in), but rather more deeply rooted in his own internal dynamics. Dynamics that I, as his son, have had a full share of as well.
When one is uncomfortable with being whole – containing both good and bad – a confession of sin is a reminder of the whole, and can be painful. If one bases one’s life on being “good,” on feeling justified and sound and accepted by being good, a regular confession of wholeness can either be pushed away, done by rote without engagement, or overwhelming.
We are under conditions of shelter in place for the Covid-19 pandemic, so of course almost none of us were able to venture out this year and have the ashes put on our foreheads for Ash Wednesday. Yet, I found myself thinking of the ritual with fondness … I’d like to think I had the ashes on my soul’s forehead.
The ritual seemed to me to be saying that we can deliberately take on our humanness, our ashiness, our fallibility, our innate self focus and not deny it or push it away or defend but even to have it spread on our foreheads and freely admit our bad, our wholeness with a congregation of fellow humbled humans.
I like to think my father might reconsider such a confession of humanness. It seems to relax one. To be a balm.