Ash Wednesday 2025

How do you encounter beauty?

Lately we have been working with my youngest daughter at having a better bedtime routine. I decided to document it by going to the dry erase board the morning after and drawing either a smiley or a frowny face. Last night the first half went well- all giggles and shadow puppets and energy and imagination. The second half- all begging and pleading and a downward spiral. After a while we were both sitting in her room not saying much to each other and she said said, “well, I know what I’m going to do, since I was good for half the night and bad the other half, I’m gonna draw a half- and-half smiley and frowny face.”

This morning she did exactly that. A little face staring at me that somehow conveyed both a smile and a frown, beauty and the mess all rolled in together.

We begin the season of Lent by marking our foreheads with dirt. Not just any dirt, but fragrant dirt made from the palm fronds from last year’s Palm Sunday celebration. Hardly beautiful, this ritual at the beginning of Lent serves a reminder of holy week. Bryan Jarrel says “Palm Sunday might also be called “Irony Sunday,” because the same crowds that welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem would be calling for his crucifixion five days later. Ash Wednesday ash on our brow isn’t just a reminder of death and sin- it’s a reminder of Holy Week’s disingenuous praise. On day one of Lent, the season calls into question the Christian’s devotion and piety, taking the memory of last year’s joyous celebration and quite literally rubbing it in our faces. It is a tangible metaphor of the weakness of our spirituality: one moment a beautiful song of praise, the next the strong fragrance of burning embers.”

Half smiley. Half frown. The beauty of life. Our own sin and death. In the blink of an eye, our devotion can change. In the blink of of an eye, dust can return to dust. We smear our faces with dirt as a reminder of sin and mortality and our utter dependence on the grace of God. Sometimes, when the palms are being burned, a prayer is spoken that says,

“Grant now, O God, that these palms, reduced to ashes, may be for us a sign of your power to purify our hearts, that we may recognize death at work in us, and replant our lives in the sure and humble soil of your truth and grace. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Facing our own mortality is hard. Recently in book club we read a book called Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty. It is about a psychic who got up one day on a plane and pointed at each person and predicted their age and cause of death. Kinda like when I would make a hospital visit and upon seeing me enter the patient would yell out “I’m not ready to die.” While none of us truly know the date and time of our death and likely prefer not to, Ash Wednesday greets us like that lady on the plane, forcing us to face both the brevity and the beauty of life. You are but dust, and to dust you shall return. Or as our excerpt from Job said, “The Spirit of God is what made me; the breath of Shaddai gives me life.”

We might think of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “The Summer Day,” in which she asks, “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

What is it you will do with your beautiful life, among the stream of daily awakenings and surrenders? As John O’Donahue says, “We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we are awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty.”

So how do you encounter beauty?

Marcia McFee says “Beauty is complex. We call something “achingly beautiful” when it creates a pathos within us–a sense of something so precious that we want it to last forever....It is sacred in the sense that it insists we be arrested into a setting apart of time and space to dwell, to linger, to gaze, and to meditate.”She says when beauty stops us in our tracks it is called the “aesthetic arrest.” Another author says we are beguiled by beauty.

Perhaps it seems an odd or a fruitless focus for Lent. How can we encounter beauty in the midst of a world on fire? Years ago Toni Morrison was feeling completely overwhelmed. She said “I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine — and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before... I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” Toni says “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”

We need beauty to inspire us and to strengthen us and to guide us on the path from ashes to glory. Psychologist Rene Proyer studied the effects of recalling and noticing beauty each day and actually had a “Nine Beautiful Things” consisting of noticing 3 beautiful things on human behavior, 3 things you experienced as beautiful in nature, and 3 things you found beautiful in general (like art, music, architecture) etc.

Can you name nine beautiful things in your week?

Here’s the thing? I can give you a huge list of what angers me, frustrates me, saddens me, and depresses me. That list I have at the ready. But a list of beauty in others, in nature, and in art? That requires that I pay attention. That I notice and participate in it. It means I have to remind myself that ashes are not the end of the story.

This week I encountered beauty in:

the weight of my daughter cuddled next to me in the morning.

the words of hymns that nurtured my spirit

the rhythm of kids playing in the middle of the woods

the melody of flooded streets pushing against the side of my van

unhurried and unburdened conversation

honest tears

the wide excited eyes of a bride-to-be as she opened her wedding gifts

the sensation of climbing into a bed with freshly washed sheets

the faces of those who are on the other side of the pain

the body language of friendships forming and deepening

soaking up the flavors of buffalo chicken dip, almond cookies, hot french fries, and a perfect slice of Lena’s pizza

So how will you encounter beauty?

As Karen Kaiser shares in her poems “From Ashes” and “Ashes,”

“You know a little something about being scorched

but hope was born from ashes

wholeness formed from dust

new life can still be found when everything else burns down

see now

how I create beauty from ashes

every sacred thing that has been scorched can be redeemed

if you are willing to reimagine the embers.”