Module One: Ashes
Introducing the participant to the idea of lament.
In preparation for this week's material, please read Chapter 1 of The Mystic Way of Evangelism, “Into the Night.”
After you have completed the above, choose one of the the following:
Podcast: “The End of Meaning—Dadism, Transformance Art, and Faith” from Peter Rollins
Poem: "The Silence" from Wendell Berry: New Collected Poems, pg 127
Video: “Learning to Walk in the Dark in Rothko Chapel”
Ash Wednesday is forty days (less Sundays) before the feast day of Easter. The forty days symbolize the Hebrew people’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness, the forty days of rain in during Noah’s flood, and Jesus’s forty-day fast in the desert.
Ashes represent a reduction, a simplification, an equivocation of all things. Garden rose and wayside weed both burn to calcium carbonate—the stuff of egg shells and pearls. Oak and primrose, dandelion and sycamore, lie down to be reborn as a chalky white limestone or collect as stalagmites in the underground chambers of the water table.
We walk through the flame of Divine examination knowing that we will burn gloriously. We will rise to the sky, glowing as embers, and fall again, cool, and quiet. It is from this place of ashes that we begin our sitting. Our lament. Our rest.
How can we learn to come, willing to be reduced, to a period of lament?