LIFE IS OUR NOTICE
Courtesy of author.
“Hey,” I nodded in passing to the mom coming out of the office as I dropped off my youngest for an appointment.
“Hey, how’s it going?” she asked and stared at my face for several beats longer than normal.
I could see the thoughts turning in her head, but I held her gaze and waited. She ends up moving on with a comment about the weather, and I continue on my day.
My church had needed readers for the early morning Ash Wednesday service and so I’d volunteered. I thus walked around the rest of the day–which this year as everyone noted was ironically on Valentines Day–sporting a smudge of ashes in the vague shape of a cross on my forehead. It’s always interesting to watch people struggle to figure out what’s on your face and whether they should say anything about it.
I returned home to an angry email. “WTF is wrong with you,” the person asked. I was taken aback. They seemed to have received my Ash Wednesday reflection for my Substack, subtitled “I love you, remember you are dying,” and not read the rest of it. I’d just spent the first half of the day walking around with a visible, “Hey, remember you’re dust” on my face, so I didn’t think my subtitle was that shocking, but here I was.
Memento mori, or “remember you will die” is behind the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. The priest smudges our foreheads and murmurs “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Those ashes come from the palms we waved last year to remember the triumphal entry. The palms are then burned at dusk on Holy Saturday, their remnants collected and ground down in a mortar and pestle and mixed with oil for the next Ash Wednesday. The entire liturgical year thus comes full circle as do our lives. We are dust. One day we will be reduced back to literal dust, but if we live on purpose, then our dust, our ashes will give new life and new meaning to the next generation.
Lent becomes the time period where people give things up: chocolate and social media are popular choices, and sometimes they skip meat on Fridays. I often wonder what it all does for us. Lent is supposed to be purposeful remembrance, repentance, and preparation. Just giving up social media doesn’t do that much for our spiritual lives if we aren’t replacing the time spent with something else.
I’m not here to pass judgment on what you did or did not give up for Lent. I just want us collectively to ask: what are we repenting of?
Repentance is something that makes us squirm a little bit I think, especially as Episcopalians. It’s an uncomfortable topic, maybe not as uncomfortable as evangelism, but it’s up there. I think that framing repentance in a “memento mori” context puts it all into perspective. Yes, we’re already uncomfortable so we might as well go all the way with it.
Repentance is our pathway to living on purpose.
A few years ago I was hiking a section of the Tecumseh trail in Indiana with a friend of mine. We’d come to a poorly marked area and were uncertain initially where the turn was. We saw a blaze and followed it, starting up the ridge. I double-checked the GPS a few minutes later to be sure and discovered we were going the wrong direction. So what did we do? We repented of our wrong decision and turned around. To continue the other way would have been foolish and dangerous.
In hiking it is perhaps easier to see this, but repentance is literally just turning around when you realize you’re in the wrong place. You can’t hike regularly without occasionally taking a wrong turn. Life is the same way, and for a lot of us, most of the “wrong turns” in life are as unintentional as the mistake my friend and I make on that hiking trip. But you can’t hike on purpose and get where you’re going unless you’re willing to turn around. Life is the same way. You can’t live on purpose without repentance.
When people discuss all the things they want to do before death inevitably comes, they rarely mention career goals or advancements. Instead, they mention relationship goals, travel goals, adventure goals. I suspect that if we all lined up our bucket lists, it would give us a peek into what humans are really made for: connection and adventure. There’s a sense that somehow our lives will be incomplete or unfulfilled without certain things, and so we all have these lists whether actual or a vague sense in our heads of things we want to accomplish.
There’s a prayer in the Great Litany we read on the first Sunday of Lent where we ask that God keep us from dying suddenly and unprepared. The idea is that you want to prepare for your death, so ideally, you would have notice you were dying so you could put your affairs in order or perhaps with enough notice, you’d finally take that trip, or finally repair that relationship, or find a way to have one last big adventure.
But what if life is our notice that we are dying? Everyday we live brings us one day closer to that inevitable conclusion: Remember, you must die. So what if life is our preparation?
Our society does everything it can to push off the thoughts of death until it is unavoidable. And then we are terrible at being with those grieving a loss because their loss reminds us that we too are dying. We shy away from our friends with terminal diagnoses and losses in their families as though the grief they are walking through is catching and our families will be next. And yet in a sense, all of us are next. Our unwillingness to look that in the face and realize it is one of the things from which we must repent.
Our inaction in the face of other people’s suffering and our unwillingness to stand with them in that suffering is something from which we must repent. We want to turn suffering into a partisan agenda, or we want to steer clear of controversy because we forgot that everything is political. Or perhaps in the case of Gaza, we’ve bought into the dominant narrative in the United States that everything in the Middle East is so hopelessly complicated that only the “experts” should even comment on it.
Even in recent days I’ve heard people expressing this sentiment. They aren’t sure what to do about Gaza because “it’s complicated.”
Only it’s not really. If anything, the actions of Israel have made it really, really simple. There is no excuse for the ongoing murder of civilians. Of children. Of starving people in line for bread. There is no excuse for starving people, for bombing hospitals, for bombing mosques, for bombing churches. For destroying 70% of the infrastructure in a region so that it will take, the UN estimates, 70 years before Gaza is fully habitable again.
The world has an anti-semitism problem. It also has an anti-Palestinian problem, and since 1917 when the Balfour declaration started to pave the way for what became the modern state of Israel, western countries have been using the Palestinian people as pawns. The people in Gaza have not been treated as individual humans with the same worth as you or I. People who are just as much image-bearers of God as you or I. Individuals who have never been here before and never will again. I’ve said before that the odds of existence for any one of us are so tiny that every life is a miracle. A Jewish proverb says that anyone who destroys the life of another is as one who has destroyed the whole world. Whole worlds are being destroyed every day.
We’ve all probably sat in a history class or watched a documentary of the civil rights movement and thought, we’d have marched for civil rights. Would we though? Because there’s a plausible genocide going on according to the international court of justice and our country is the one arming it. Isn’t that worth marching for?
Look at cities near you and see if you can join a Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage. It’s a walk in solidarity with the suffering people in Gaza. It is a way to help call for an immediate and lasting ceasefire, immediate humanitarian aid, and a way to stand against all hatred including anti-semitism and Islamophobia. It is a way to call for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. If you can’t walk, you can donate and/or find an alternate way to join in. I’ve seen nursing home residents pacing the halls of their home with their walkers. I heard someone in Antarctica is doing the entire length of Gaza on their treadmill. Anything you can do that helps to raise awareness helps. Anytime we stand up together and say, no more, our voices become amplified. There have been clear signals from our government that the tide of opinion is turning and each of us can be a part of that. This is our moment in history. It might not be the only one, but it is certainly a defining one. Where were you when there was a genocide in Gaza that our government was supplying the weapons for? What did you do?
Maybe you just now realized you haven’t done what you’d like to have done during this crisis. It’s not too late to turn around. Our nation is showing signs of realizing they’ve let this go way too far (and really that’s a gross understatement). It’s not too late for them to save lives now even though it is too late for so many. But our nation can turn around too. It’s time for repentance.
Remember you must die. Remember you only get this one chance at life on this planet. There’s no way to get everything right, that’s why it takes repentance to live with purpose. Repentance realigns us with the path we meant to be walking, and it’s not too late to turn around when we find we’ve wandered away from where we meant to be. If life is the notice we get that we’re dying, what, as Mary Oliver once asked, will you do with your one wild and precious life?
