Sifting

For those who follow the Christian liturgical calendar, Ash Wednesday comes 40 days before Easter and commemorates the beginning of the Lenten season. It’s a time to honor the reality that we are mortal. We say things like “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” While this may seem morbid and even gross as we literally put ashes on our faces, as a Palliative Care chaplain in the middle of a divorce after a 17 year marriage, it could not be more fitting. I am not living a life right now that can ignore loss and sorrow. It is all over my face.

As seems to happen more often than not since the pandemic, my community’s plans had to change as we received an unexpected deluge of snow today and the city shut down. So I self-administered the ashes I swiped from work before I left for home early to beat the anxious Portlanders to the freeway.

I arrived at my quiet and beautiful home, to the stillness that comes on the days my children are with their father, with the communion cup of ashes clutched in my grip to protect them from the falling snow.

I took a nap. I had an orgasm. I ate pasta in bed. I listened to my favorite women on a podcast. Then I hopped on Zoom to see my people and to hold the tender truth in community that we all are dust and will return to dust one day. And, that somehow, this dust is magic. Magic put here on earth, animated and full of life and love and hopes and dreams. We lit our candles, burned our pages, had our communion, anointed ourselves with oil, and imposed our own ashes. We talked for awhile afterwards, checking in on each other, inquiring about the lives of new folks (there are always new folks), and sharing our community’s joys and concerns.

It is a bittersweet thing to spend so much time with death. So many of my friends from work are dying patients. And, we are the only sentient beings as fully aware of our impermanence. We live in this reality we so often would prefer was not true - that everything we know and love and rely on will eventually end. Our very deepest attachments are all temporary.

We can imagine that dust is so insignificant that it just blows away with a small gust of wind, never to be seen again. It would be so easy to think that the dust, that we, are inconsequential. And yet. That is where the magic comes from. This God who breathed life into us, gave us these deeply feeling, deeply attaching hearts with the full awareness that all will eventually go back into the ground. The meaning is not in spite of the impermanence. I think it is, at least partially, because of it. It is because we know that everything we care about is temporary, that it becomes worthy of our full presence, attention, and being while we have it.

We have it. Right now.

We’ve lost some of it already. What do we need to be present to in this moment? And what do we need to mourn and bury?

It seems fitting to me that this is the first year I have participated in my church’s Maundy Thursday service (of course, on Zoom). If you haven’t ever included this Holy Day in your spiritual practice, it is an commemoration of Jesus’ last day before his crucifixion. We take communion and we tell the story of his death. Then we regather on Easter morning to break the vigil we begin on Maundy Thursday to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.

I say it seems fitting because this year, death feels close. Thankfully, I am not ill. None of my loved ones are ill. And I know that makes me incredibly privileged during this time of COVID-19, where the virus seems all around us. But between the virus and my CPE work at the hospital, it seems I am daily being confronted with the reality of death.

It has become part of my spiritual practice to attend to the dead and dying and their loved ones. This is new work for me. I have not been around a lot of death, though I spent my childhood in community and we certainly lost many people over the years. Somehow, being in those hospital rooms, especially with such limited visitation right now, this feels different.

For one, I am witnessing it almost every day I come into work (this is not a reflection of the state of the virus, but I think a common experience in Spiritual Care practice). That’s a lot of death. And now today, I spent a bit of my evening singing and reading the story of the death of God.

There’s a true heaviness to this time and to the work of God in the world sometimes. It is not all light and breezy. And for me, it has become important practice to not wish the heaviness away (I don’t mean to never take a break, but rather to not play ‘hot potato’ with it). This work, this deep, deathly work is important to what it means to be a human being. It’s hard. There are a lot of feelings to experience: fear, sadness, grief, anxiety, anger, resentment, frustration, stress…I could name every feeling and it it probably applies in the roller coaster experience that is death.

One of my fellow CPE interns recently said, “There’s no more human thing to do than to die.” And I thought, “That would not have been something I would have subscribed to three months ago.” This is a specific season, a specific time - both in the world and in our lives.

And I guess I wanted to come on here tonight and just wish peace and love to everyone as we communally go through death both in the Holy Week that is Easter and in the experience of COVID-19, where so much is left feeling uncertain and unstable. I think in all the instability and loss, we can find God here. I think he can meet us here. He can be present with us in this.

I don’t subscribe to any idea that God brings suffering or inflicts it deliberately. What a cruel thing to believe. I believe in love. And you know what? Love meets us in suffering. That’s why loss hurts so much in the first place - it’s the evidence that we experienced love at all. Glennon Doyle calls it our receipt. Embrace the pain of loss and hold on tight. There is beauty and growth waiting for us in the pain. Not when all the pain goes away - right now, in the pain.

And if this isn’t the right message for you tonight, if you need something happier and more shiny, it’s okay to skip me this time. I totally understand how important it is to guard our consumption of material right now. But if you’re feeling the heaviness, I just want you to know, that’s what makes you human. And humans do hard things. You are loved. Easter Sunday is coming.