Ash Wednesday Words

For a while now Ash Wednesday and Good Friday have been difficult days for me to observe. The crushing grief of these days has robbed me of myself, and the lovingly prepared liturgies have rendered me incapable of movement.

Last year I did go to the Mass at my sons Jesuit high school and was given warmth and love by the boys who had been or who were in my confirmation group and that made the solemnity and grief bearable. This year I took a deep breath and chose to attend Ash Wednesday Mass at the school again. In the interim there has been a new Rector appointed, only in the last few weeks, so the preparation for the service was undertaken by  lay people who are members of staff. Both of them are incredibly conservative and the service reflected this. As such it was a potently painful service, full of thundering and hell fire and damnation and seven hundred boys sat restively and disconnected from the proceedings. In that moment I gave thanks for Terri Pilaski and those she works with saying that Words Matter, for here before me was the living evidence of the alienating power of words.

Where, I wondered from my seat at the back, is the Grace of God in all this? Where is the celebration of that Grace which to my mind should have been the focus to the service. We are sinners. Yes. But what we celebrate during Lent is that God’s Grace reaches out to us, offering reconciliation and healing in the form of His most precious gift. His only son.

I have lost an eighteen year old nephew who was in my care for several years as the result of suicide and I had a beautiful, if physically incomplete, still born daughter. Last year my Dad, who was also my friend and mentor died suddenly. Those losses, amongst others, have marked my life with grief and sent me out to dwell in desert lands where the Living God is silent, where his language is silence. Once more on Ash Wednesday, and no doubt also on Good Friday I will wonder at a God who is silent yet sacrifices his most precious possession, his only son for the forgiveness of my sins. 

I wonder at his own sense of loss, and how he bears it. For mine has been nearly unendurable. 

I wonder when I feel so alone how he is able to connect ...