"Stop fretting. Come and eat."

"Stop fretting. Come and eat."

That was my late grandmother's general cure for any difficult situation. Just drop it for now, come sit down at the table, and we'll all eat together. THEN we'll work through it.

Mind you, this was the advice from the person in my family "most likely to clash with you." No doubt, my granny was a fiery woman. She was a highly opinionated, not easily persuaded person. But she understood the need to call a truce at the dinner table.

The dinner table is an interesting place for me. It's my source of greatest comfort and the source of my greatest baggage. Growing up in an alcoholic family, it was the place most likely to erupt at my house. My parents' table was a far different place than my grandparents' table. It was like two different worlds. My parents' table was a battlefield; my grandparents' table was an oasis.

The magic of my grandparents' table was probably what drew me to the full meaning of the Eucharist. My grandparents' table had one rule: NO FIGHTING. I firmly belived that the main reason her generation survived the Depression was they sat together at the table and shared what they had.

Even living alone, I realize that a "shared meal" is important to me. Home alone, I share with my dogs. At the homes of others, I share good conversation, respectful debate, compliments to the chef. If you gave me the choice of sharing leftovers at your house, vs. a meal at the fanciest restaurant in town, I'd pick the leftovers at the homes of friends. My guess is that the level to which it touches my heart for someone to invite me to put my feet under their dinner table would surprise them. When I think about certain friends of mine, the images that often come into play in my mind are images of "sitting at their kitchen table." Likewise, my fondest memories of "good days at church" center around the altar and the sharing the Eucharistic table.

Now, that doesn't mean my entire experience has been happy happy joy joy. As I mentioned earlier, I have those fond memories DESPITE some very traumatic dinner table memories, and the Eucharistic table is no exception. There have been times I did NOT feel welcome at God's table, or made to feel less of a full participant in the process. Suffice it to say it had more to do with experiences in my past where I learned that there are people out there who use God's table as punishment, or a way to separate and classify, or a way to create guilt. There are times I might have felt so uncomfortable about myself that I did not feel worthy of God's table. But these are all feelings, that, the only way they are ever overcome is to keep coming to the table anyway.

As I alluded to in my previous post, Ash Wednesday is the time we go to the altar twice--one to get the ashes on our forehead, and once to share the sacramental meal. I think it's important to recognize we return that second time, "dirty." Our being holy and squeaky clean is NOT a requirement to share the body and blood of Christ. In fact, if that were the case, why would we need it at all? The truth of the matter is, every week, whether we recognize it or not, we ARE coming to the table with dirt under our fingernails, or with the tar of a weary world smeared on us, or with dog doo on our shoes. Ash Wednesday is the only day where we wear a visible and outward sign of that "dirt."

It's the time I feel the most unsure, the most separated, the most out of place that I have to remember my grandmother's voice--"Stop fretting. Come and eat."

Palms to ashes, crush 'em to dust

(Photo from the author of Staying Awake)

For three years now, I've taken it upon myself to be "The Burner of the Palms" for Ash Wednesday. Tradition holds that the ashes for Ash Wednesday be the ashes from the previous year's Palm Sunday. Now, it doesn't matter that I end up each year making enough ashes to smear crosses on half of Kirksville--I like to make them every year simply because I like keeping with the ancient tradition. It doesn't matter that you can actually buy palm ashes from religious supply houses--I just like the notion of our parish getting smeared with "our" ashes.

I took on this ministry of sorts to make our late "queen of the Altar Guild's" wish come true. We had been using "store-bought ashes" until three years ago, and it sort of galled her. She would wrinkle up her nose at the little package of store-bought ashes and grunt, "These are not very good ashes. We really should be making our own." (Now, I don't really know what qualifies as "not very good ashes," but I took her at her word.) So the next Palm Sunday, I grabbed all the leftover palms and put them out in my garage.

The first year was kind of a comedy of errors. I didn't let them dry out long enough, and tried to burn them late that summer, experimenting with a few in a coffee can. After throwing lighter fluid and, eventually motor oil, I got them burned, but they didn't smell like anything anyone would want on their forehead. So I let them dry out a few more months and tried again. This time I got the bright idea to put them on the gas grill and let them start to smoke a little before lighting them. Success! The only problem was I had the fire under them too hot, and burned a hole in the cheap roasting pan, and lost about half the ashes. It was a very embarrassing display for someone who loves fire and "burning stuff" as much as I do!

The second year, however, I was ready. I knew enough to let the palms "smoke" on the higher rack in the gas grill. I suddenly appeared to be a "professional palm burner." This year went without a hitch.

This year, I pondered the therapeutic nature of my annual duty. Burning the palms carries a lot of positive symbolism for me. The palms slated for burning represent a year's worth of things in my life that were "not quite right." They are the old things, the dried out things, the dessicated things, the things I'd like to have a do-over. They are the things worth repenting, the things worth burying, the things worth dispersing. It's good to watch them burn.

After they are burned, the next step is to pulverize them to dust. I usually use something like the bottom of an old coffee cup to grind them down. It feels renewing, somehow, to take those burned leaves and crush them to a fine powder. I put my weight into my arm and put a little "oomph" to it. I think about the Second Law of Thermodynamics--that everything, over time, becomes more random. The things that mattered last year and got in my way, or hampered my faith journey in some way are becoming more random, more unrecognizable. Again, there's a sense of renewal with that, a feeling that we really can start over, if we so choose.

I remember the first year "my" ashes were used. Lots of people commented on how nice and black they were. The "store bought" ones of previous years were a little on the gray side. I got an odd satisfaction about that--that my work, even in a somber moment such as Ash Wednesday, made others feel that they got the "real deal", the full experience of the tradition.

But for me, burning and pulverizing the ashes gives me a fuller sense of what it means for our sins to be forgiven, for God to no longer remember them, for them to be flung as far as east is from west. I think about how everyone walks out of the service on Ash Wednesday with the "same dirt" on them. My sins are not so unique. They're the same as everyone else's. We bear the corporate burden of each other's sins. We're not so much our brother's keeper as we are our brother's sibling. All our sins are made up of the same DNA, so to speak.

What makes the Ash Wednesday service unique is it's the one time we go forward twice--the first time to accept our common sins, and the second time to receive a common meal. There's a tendency, I think, to think of the "sins" part, the "From dust you came and to dust you will return" part as a solo adventure, but in reality, it's just as common and corporate as the meal.

Stay tuned--I'll blog about the meal next.