I wasn’t happy about it.
If it weren’t for A asking me what we were going to do for Ash Wednesday, I probably would have ignored it. Pretended it was just another day. Neglected to do anything, simply because I couldn’t have it the way I wanted. It would have been a terrible decision, and one that I would have regretted, but it would have been the easy one. Instead, I did what I felt obligated to do—I put this worship guide out into the world—it was only right that we actually used it.
I also knew if we did nothing, my girls would grow up and always remember the year we didn’t do Ash Wednesday. It would be one more thing the pandemic took away.
So when we finished eating dinner, I quietly cleared the dinner dishes and lit all the candles I could find. We turned down the lights and sang a version of Create in Me that will forever be a favorite (thanks John Tirro). I asked if anyone wanted to read from the Bible, and A jumped at the chance. I always get a little teary when I hear her read from Scripture. There’s something about hearing God’s Word from a child that gives me a new perspective on whatever is being read.
After she read from Joel, we talked about what it means to confess our sins and to return to the Lord. This is always hard for the girls. For all of us really. None of us really want to admit when we’ve been bad. We want people to love us, and if we’ve been bad, that might not be so. We want to be right. We don’t want to think about the people we’ve hurt; or the ones that have hurt us—lack of forgiveness is a sin too.
We talked about how God is a merciful God. Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. And that because of that, we can feel free to confess our sins to him and know that we will be forgiven. We had a few moments of quiet as we each contemplated what to write on the blank page before us. One looked at me with tears in her eyes, so I took her to the next room and we whispered about some of the things she’s done over the last few days that might not have been the best behavior. It reminded me that sometimes it’s hard to think about what we need to confess. We get in our routine and we don’t even realize how we have turned away from God, or the need to repent—to turn back.
We folded our pieces of paper full of confessions and threw them into a bowl, praying that God would create in us clean hearts and renew right spirits within us. We lit a match and threw it in. One after another, the pieces of paper caught fire and we watched as they burned. When the smoke began to rise we feared the smoke alarm going off, so we moved the bowl to the stove and turned the vent fan on. “But I want to watch!” they cried. So we moved the stool and gathered around our bowl of sins, and watched as we lit match after match until they were finally all burned.
There’s something almost cathartic about watching your sins burn. The flames lick the edge of the bowl, the colors change from red to orange to blue and back to orange again. The paper that was once white is now black and ashy. “That looks so cool,” the littlest one said. “I love watching all the colors.”
It reminded me of a time at church camp when I was a teen. The confessing of sins and the burning of them in the courtyard outside our dorms. I don’t remember the confessions I made, but I remember how I felt when I watched them go up in flames. I remember the tears as I apologized to God for the things I had done. And I remember the way my heart felt lighter after the absolution had been proclaimed.
After they were all gone, we moved the bowl over and let them cool. We read more Scripture, talked about what we might do during Lent to turn ourselves back towards God. And then, in the holiest of moments, the baby of the family—my tiny 6-year-old—she turned those burned sins into ashes with her hands. As she mixed them with olive oil and her fingers turned black, she took on the role of the one who reminds us. I put my finger in the bowl, turned towards her and made the mark of the cross on her forehead as I said “remember you are dust ... and to dust you shall return.”
She took great pride in reminding us all. She dipped a finger in, pulled it out, raised it up to a forehead, and in her small, quiet, 6-year-old voice, “remember you are dust....and to dust you shall return.”
For me.
For him.
For her sister.
It was in that last tender moment between sisters that I most strongly felt the presence of God among us. It was in that moment that tonight became most holy. In that moment, God took all my sorrow of being away from my beloved church community and filled my heart with a deep appreciation for this tender family worship experience we shared around the same counter we had just eaten dinner on.
We washed her hands, then gathered in a circle to say the Lord’s Prayer together. And as I heard their little voices say the words louder and clearer than they’ve ever said them in church, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this will be an Ash Wednesday we will always remember.
Not because of what it lacked, but because of how God showed up.