Snow and Ash
Brittany Stillwell
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow.
This Kentucky girl is used to a couple good snows a winter and still, when it snows, I am overcome with this overwhelming urgency, “Make the most of it! This is a gift!” I want to snuggle in and play outside and build a snowman and drink coffee and go sledding and read books and work puzzles… all at the same time. So, you can imagine what my brain is doing in this incredibly rare Arkansan snowpocalypse.
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow.
Snow days are supposed to be an excuse to stop, to take in the beauty, to rest, play, and renew. Or at least, that’s what this child of a teacher learned from a very early age. I was much older, with my own job when I finally realized, not everyone gets to slam on the breaks when it snows, and if they do, for many not going to work means not being able to eat or pay the bills at the end of the month.
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow.
Snow days should involve hunkering down and bundling up with fireplaces and warm blankets and steaming cups of hot chocolate. They should include baking your favorite treats and demand a good pot of soup to warm you from the inside after playing outside so long you can’t feel your fingers or toes or nose or anything else for that matter. And yet, this isn’t the case for everyone. For many the snow isn’t a beautiful reflection of God’s grace, but a life-threatening phenomenon and the source of much fear.
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow.
I’d like to go back to the days when snow was pure magic and wonder, to sit in this chair with my coffee and cat and marvel only in the beauty, but Ash Wednesday is coming and the longer I sit here, the more the snow transforms into this confluence of ash and snow, beauty and pain, life and death.
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow.
But maybe this is what Ash Wednesday is all about—the Lovely Broken (to quote the title of a song by Gungor). We are lovely, carefully molded from dirt by our creator, given life through the sacrifice and pain of another. And yet, we are so very broken—fragile beings whose very breath can be cut off by something as simple as snow. Maybe Ash Wednesday and the season ahead is about learning to live in this tension. Maybe these snow days, pandemic days, Lenten days, in their strange mix of joy and pain and everything in between, provide us with the opportunity to hold it all in our wondrous, fragile beings. Maybe, no matter what the current ratio, life is always some combination of lovely broken, snow and ash. And maybe, just maybe, this is what the cross has to teach us, at its intersection of life and death, of sacrifice and love, of beauty and pain.
It’s hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow. And yet, we must.
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
5 Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.
6 You desire truth in the inward being;[a]
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
This Ash Wednesday is one like none other. We can’t be together and we couldn’t even get ashes to you for virtual worship tonight. But we will worship anyway. We will mark the day and ourselves, maybe even with snow. And when we do, maybe just maybe it will transform into some mysterious mix of snow and ash, dirty and clean, pure and tainted, lovely broken—and all will be made whole.
Maybe it’s not so hard to think about ash when the world is covered in snow after all.
