Adventures in Ashes
My plans for Ash Wednesday turned to dust (and to dust all plans return)
I’d made a whole careful plan. To start, thankfully, Wednesday was already the twins’ “long” day at daycare (six hours instead of three), so they’d be set until 3pm. That would give me plenty of time to get across the breadth of Los Angeles to sing at a noontime Ash Wednesday service at my church in Beverly Hills, and even to the choir rehearsal before the service. I’d have time to drive home again before my daycare booking was up. The whole thing would take a 3-4 hour bite out of a midweek workday, but I’d use one of my many, many accumulated vacation days. After all, Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is a religious holiday. I am, it’s no use denying, a religious person.
The above plan was settled with weeks to spare. I was so on top of this Ash Wednesday thing!
The first card to fall was my vacation day. A podcast recording session originally set for Tuesday night had to be moved to Wednesday or we’d lose our special guest, a New Orleans-based novelist (the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is, famously, Mardi Gras — Fat Tuesday). But no crisis! The recording would take about 90 minutes. I’d pick up the kids at 3 and still have some time before the 5pm recording. I resigned myself to making a little exception to my vacation day, and even arranged for someone to come play with the kids during the recording.
The second card fell when I realized that I’d set an important work meeting for February 18: my annual performance review. Or, rather, when I realized that February 18 was Ash Wednesday, a day I requested off so that I could spend the very hours for which the meeting was set commuting to Beverly Hills for a church service. Embarrassed, I rescheduled, hoping the mistake wouldn’t reflect too poorly on my, you know, performance.
In the final minutes of morning choir rehearsal on the last Sunday before Lent, my section leader checked in with our choir director. What was the call time for Ash Wednesday? Was it 6:30?
It was 6:30. 6:30 p.m.
The thing about the “house of cards” metaphor is that none can fall without the whole thing crumbling. I should have seen it coming.
And literally, I should have seen it coming. Had I even once cross-checked my mistaken notion that we sang at noon on Ash Wednesday, I’d have been able to make a more appropriate plan. I have, mind you, sung in this choir for over 10 years. We have never sung at noon on Ash Wednesday. Sure, there is a service at noon. I’ve attended it as a parishioner (this was easy to do when I worked in Beverly Hills). And we sing at noon on the other side of Lent, Good Friday. Good Friday and Ash Wednesday share a rather gloomy, solemn aesthetic. Somewhere in there, a wire got crossed, and it was too late to uncross it for at least three different reasons. I would not be singing on Ash Wednesday.
I cancelled my day off. Not only was I already planning to cheat and work on a vacation day, but as it turns out, Monday of that same week was a “real,” office-closed holiday (President’s Day, perhaps the least religious holiday). I work from home much of the time, but Wednesday is almost always an office day. I’d go in, have my performance review as originally scheduled, work, pick up the kids, and eventually send them on their play date so I could engineer my recording from home. Somewhere in all that, I hoped to find some place, some time, that I could go get ashes imposed. Our office is in downtown Los Angeles. Surely, I thought, there must be a church down there somewhere.
As it turns out, the office is one subway stop away from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Catholic Cathedral for the archdiocese of Los Angeles. I’m not Catholic, but I’ve always found that one big benefit of not being Catholic is not caring what denomination of church gives you your sacraments. I doubted they’d be checking credentials at the narthex.
By the time the performance review ended (it went fine; no mention was made of my scheduling snafu), the 12pm service at Our Lady of the Angels had already begun. As I rushed toward the elevator, I choked out a quick excuse to my coworkers. “I’m gonna go try and get reminded of my death.” I don’t know if any of them heard me.
I didn’t know anything about the service I’d be dropping into. When would they start the ashes part? How much of the mass would that part take up? As I waited endless minutes for the subway to arrive, I told myself that it didn’t really matter if I made it or not. It would be an adventure of sorts. I’d never been to the famous cathedral before. As far as the actual sacrament, it’s not as if getting a cross smudged onto your forehead is some kind of magic spell. Right? I knew that having spent the effort to try and observe Ash Wednesday would be enough if I could let it be enough.
This personal pep talk wouldn’t stop me from speedwalking down Temple Street toward First after getting off the train. I careened into a courtyard opening and found myself in the midst of a sprawling church campus. A young woman in a black polo shirt and black slacks stopped me immediately. “What’s your business here?” she asked, as politely as such a sentence can be uttered.
“I was hoping to attend the noon service,” I apologized. “I know I’m late.” It must’ve been 12:40 by then. “The ashes?”
If I’d been intending to masquerade as an actual Catholic, I’d already blown the game. “Oh, the mass?” she suggested, pointing in the right direction? I was in!
A few steps later, another ambassador told me I couldn’t take my drink into the church. “It’s empty!” I said, taking a final swig of coffee and stuffing my reusable cup into my purse. But I knew I was in the right place, because folks with black crosses smudged on their foreheads were pouring down the ramp in front of me. The pouring part made me pick up my pace yet again; if this many people were leaving the sanctuary, had I missed the whole thing?
I practically ran toward the doors. And then I laughed, remembering my own sentiments as I’d left the office.
Running. I was running to be reminded of my own death. Why?
I ran right into some kind of answer to that impossible question.
I was not too late. The massive cathedral was absolutely full of people. Lines of my fellow penitent — at least eight lines, maybe more — crisscrossed the many aisles of the sanctuary. The pews were full too, of those already marked, and others hovered at the back and sides of the cavernous space. A small group of cantors sang, amplified by a microphone, and dozens of priests received the throngs of bare foreheads, thumbs blackened and ready to mark the sign of the cross.
It was breathtaking. The middle of a Wednesday, the middle of the noisy city, and here we all were. There must have been a thousand people. I should have expected it — the Catholic cathedral, in Southern California, in the second most populous city in the country. But I hadn’t imagined such a scene was possible. As a result, I waited in my chosen line with a huge, goofy grin on my face, thrilled and astonished to have found myself in the midst of this unlikely spectacle.
“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That’s the incantation that has accompanied every imposition of ashes I’ve received in my Lutheran and Episcopalian experience. When I reached the front of this line, though, the Catholic priests were saying something different. “Repent,” they said, “and believe the Gospels.”
Repent is a complicated word. It conjures doomsday predictors with cardboard signs above their heads. Heck, didn’t I pass a guy with a sign that said something like that on my way up the hill to the Cathedral? I’m no biblical scholar, but I’ve read that if you look at the Hebrew or the Greek, “repent” implies a turning of one’s heart and mind toward God.
Sometimes I feel myself turning so hard to catch a glimpse of God that I am spinning in circles. I’m running up a hill, and I don’t know why I’m running, or what I’ll find at the top.
But then: the Gospels. Where in the the final hours before his own dance with death would begin, Jesus’ words to his friends were this: “I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” (John 13:34)
I didn’t stick around much longer than the time it took to get to the front of the line and then out the back of the sanctuary. Five, maybe ten minutes. The sun was shining, and I decided to walk back to the office instead of taking the train — I even took the Angels’ Flight funicular down the hill.
Anyone who has worn midday Wednesday ashes out into the daylight can tell you that at some point, at least once before the cross smudges itself off or is rinsed clean away, someone will tell you that you have some black stuff on your forehead. They will probably not be making an ironic joke; it’ll be a well-meaning barista or a stranger at the grocery store, hoping to save you some additional embarrassment, as if they were pointing out some cilantro stuck between your teeth.
As for me, I forgot all about my marked forehead until hours later, when a series of public transit mishaps left me in the back seat of a Lyft from Boyle Heights back to a Pasadena train station. The driver was talkative an good-natured, and didn’t stop talking even after noticing that I was still trying to work on my phone as we went. He pointed out the striking snow caps on the San Gabriel Mountains before us, and we tried to remember what that particular peak was called. We’d nigh well gotten to know each other by the time he got off the freeway.
“I just wanted to ask,” he offered lightly, “You have some black stuff on your forehead. Is that supposed to be there?”
“Oh that,” I said, grinning now. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be there.”