Making Ashes with our Creative Gifts
Shortly after Palm Sunday in 2011, our youth completed a beautiful art project with the gifted Liz Edge out of palm crosses from that year’s service. After the Palm Sunday Eucharist, where small crosses made of palm leaves where pinned on the jackets, shirts, and dresses of people who walked through the doors, some of the youth of the church began to inquire as to what would happen to the leftover palm crosses. The church tradition calls for crosses to be saved until the following Lent when they are burned to provide the ash for Ash Wednesday. Then the crosses that were worn to proclaim Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem as focused in the liturgy of the palms become the very symbol of our mortality when we hear the words, “and to dust you shall return.” A cross made of the ashes is placed on the forehead of each person who walks forward during Ash Wednesday.
If I am honest, tradition and convenience do not always have the best relationship. Most churches, including our own, usually order ash. Yes, you can order palm ash from a company called CM Almy and I bet there are others waiting patiently for our business. It is cleaner, and honestly, an easier consistency to spread.
And so on that Palm Sunday nine years ago, a few of our youth were bothered when the crosses began a new procession to the dumpster at the corner of our back parking lot. An idea for an art project was born. Resurrection from what was to be discarded was the theme.
A large, almost three-foot-tall cross was created. The cross resembled one of the crosses on the north side of the building and has rested over the inside door of the nave for the past 8 years. It is a beautiful cross, and when it was created was never intended to be a permanent fixture in our church. The cross has been taken down in order for the cross that was over the entrance to the Memorial Garden to be installed. The cross that is moving to the nave is a beautiful bronze cross by the artist, Cordrey Parker, and as it is heavy and intended to be permanent, the wall is being reinforced to support it.
I have been wondering what the church should do with this precious gift built with the passion of our youth and the creative vision of Liz Edge. And the best and most faithful answer I can conjure up is to burn it. We should burn the palms from the cross, and to take the ashes and don them on Ash Wednesday.
See, we come from dust and we return to dust, but a lot takes place in between. We are animated in Spirit, vessels of God’s love, and vessels of God’s creativity. We are filled with memories, stories, songs, and things done and left undone. We are art projects being perfected over the course of a lifetime. While we are but dust, we are so much more. We are children of God who use God’s creative gifts to share God’s love and grace.
This Ash Wednesday, you won’t feel the fine work of CM Almy. Ash Wednesday might be a bit grittier. But you will be marked with love and palm ash, with the creativity that has blessed our congregation for over 8 years, now blesses you, and then will be washed off and make its way to the ground to renew the earth with the same blessing. You will be reminded that our lives are mortal, but God’s love and creativity is eternal.
- John+
Ash Wednesday services will 7:00am, 12:15pm, and 6:30pm. The nursery will be available at 6:30pm.