Feeling the moist dirt
look for the sun
with holy eyes
take a deep breath
and remember:
You belong here.
~Rumi

Looking at the altar draped in purple cloth and candlelight, I noticed two bowls, both of earthen tones. It was Ash Wednesday so one likely would hold the ashes that would be used to trace a cross of two intersecting lines on our foreheads. What was in the other? Because I have placed  ashes on many foreheads over time, I know for a fact that you need very little to create this mark that begins the journey of Lent. It would be rare to need another such large container.

As the person who was to offer reflection on both scripture and intention for this season came to speak, I noticed her shirt, more like a smock, was covered with planets and constellations. I smiled. This Sister of St. Joseph had a message to give and she planned to illustrate it not only with words but with her very clothing. After pointing to the small bowl that held the ashes she moved toward the larger one and allowed her fingers to sift dirt in a tiny stream through the air and back into the bowl. She spoke of this dirt as holding the bones of dinosaurs, plants, minerals, stardust and even other humans who have gone before. She lifted a small amount of the dirt once again to allow the enormity of that to sink in. “From dust we have come and to dust we will return.” This season which can seem sometimes dour and dreary begins with these words…words we don’t much like to think about. 

“These days of Lent are a call to life.” she said. The life that comes from all the ways we are beings of earth, soil, dirt, that place that brings life with the cycling of winter to spring. It was not your usual Ash Wednesday message. I can imagine it is not the message she most likely heard over her years in the church. But as she reminded us of this call to life that guides us during these days, she reached just a little further into the soil and pulled up a living, green shoot of a plant. It was the work of an excellent teacher and smiles broke out…even on Ash Wednesday. Her words helped us remember who we are and why we are here…creatures born of Earth and called to live life fully, wholly, holy.

With only one week of Lent under our belts, the days of winter are changing and promising a spring that will surprise us with green and color buried beneath snow that seems to have been here forever. But the Sun is high and strong and has plans for executing its power on even the tallest of snow drifts. The call toward life cannot be contained. It is good to be reminded. By the presence of soil, dirt, dust, ashes. From which we came…and to which we will one day return. 

In the meantime, it is about life. 

“It is one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold; when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”
~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

March is a month that holds a double edged sword. Winter…particularly this winter…still holds us in its grip. And the promise of spring…increasing light, the cardinal’s song in early morning, buds visible on branches break into the every day. March is a balancing act of months. 

And for those of us who honor some sense of the Christian year, March also ushers in the days of Lent, those weeks when we reflect on wilderness and what walking in the wilderness can teach a person, how it can offer a place of revelation or seed of growth. Wilderness: “ an uncultivated, uninhabited, inhospitable region; a position of disfavor, especially in a political context.” So goes the definition.

Many I know, myself included, feel as if we have been walking in wilderness for some time now. Our very ordinary days are threaded through with the experience of wilderness. Values and norms we held as sacred have been abandoned or dismantled. Things like kindness, generosity, inclusion, compassion, justice, and truth telling seem to have fallen into the dark crevices of rocky landscapes. Rising up from behind hills have been words and acts of racism, cruelty, division, exclusion and sheer mean-spiritedness. Desert places cry out for nourishment, something to tip the scales. Those on the margins long to be seen and heard. Those of us who stand in privilege seem often helpless to turn the tides. From so many places around our country and our world this is the wilderness made visible.

And in the church I have loved for so long another wilderness has engulfed those who seek to be the Face of God in our time. Those who call themselves United Methodists have chosen to cast some in our community into wilderness by the act of exclusion. And in doing so, we are all turned out into the wilderness of our making to decide, as Jesus was in his wilderness journey, who and what we will worship. Perhaps these six weeks of Lent will lead us to a truer understanding of what this experience of wilderness really offers. How will we find ourselves come Easter morning? How will be able to proclaim resurrection in times such as these?

As for me, these March days, these Lenten days have me remembering the words I read on the first day of the month, March 1st, St. David’s Day. This patron saint of Wales whose life and faith are celebrated in this small country of my ancestors was also surrounded by his own experiences of wilderness as he sought to reflect the Spirit in his time. And yet one of the quotes most often attributed to him is: “ Be joyful. Keep your faith. Do the little things.”

Do the little things. When I read those words again on March 1st, something shifted in my chest, always a good sign of opening to what is deepest within. The wilderness can seem so overwhelming, so impossible to walk as a mere human when seen and experienced in its fullness. And yet the truth that every good and important journey begins with one step…one little thing…continues to unfold as wisdom. 

And so that will become my practice this Lent. I will seek to do the little things. Notice the little things. Praise the little things. Celebrate the little things. Take hope in the little things. See and work for justice in the little things. Encourage the little things. As March turns to April, I will continue one day, one step at a time…in the wilderness…holding onto the little things. Just as the enormous mounds of snow outside our doors began with one tiny flake, perhaps these little things will grow into something more than I could have imagined.