a litany of loss for Ash Wednesday 2021
This is the litany we would have used in place of the imposition of ashes for our online Ash Wednesday service — cancelled due to unreliability of power and internet during the winter storm and infrastructure breakdown in Texas this week. — 2/17/21
Ash Wednesday is one of the high holy days on the Christian calendar that has weirdly specific equipment for its ritualized observance. Advent has those purple and pink candles in a wreath; Christmas Eve has the little white candles with the paper skirts for sharing the light; Palm Sunday has tree branches we buy by the bunch from the florist; Easter has bright flowers for adorning an empty, steampunk cross strung with a fishing line grid.
And Ash Wednesday has ashes made from the burning of last year’s Palm Sunday palms – or at least, it’s supposed to. To begin the season of Lent every year we stand in an orderly line and wait for someone to dab our foreheads with the sign of our sorrow. “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” says the priest, marking you with mortality. Over the years I have stained my thumb with oily ash and my cheeks with tears as I have told some of my best friends, “You’re going to die, and you know it.” I have named my own children’s impermanence, and some of yours.
But as we’ve already said this year, there’s little chance that any of us have forgotten for even a moment, lately, that life is fragile, that our days and nights in God’s care do not guarantee our safety or survival. We’re well aware; we have nearly drowned in the despair of it. So fuck the ashes; we don’t need them this year. And we couldn’t figure out how to get them through the screen to your embodied self anyway.
Instead, tonight, I invite you to pick up that Sharpie, that ballpoint pen, that eyeliner, whatever you’ve got available for marking, and listen to our Litany of Loss. Make tally marks on your wrist or forearm, or the back of your hand, for each of the losses we name that is true for you. Let your own hand keep the count of how hard it’s been, and how hard you’ve tried, and how hard we are hoping, still, for God’s own self to have compassion for us, and soothe our suffering, and make us whole. This is our Litany of Loss for Ash Wednesday 2021.
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In the global Corona virus pandemic of 2020 and 2021,
we lost so many beloveds and neighbors and strangers and enemies.
In the U.S. alone, we’re approaching
half a million deaths due to this damn virus.
It’s about two-and-a-half million deaths around the world,
though that number is probably way too low.
Lots of countries simply don’t have
the health infrastructure to count accurately,
And some governments want to keep it quiet,
how bad it’s been.
How much suffering they’ve (we’ve) endured.
But whether we count it or not,
whether we know about each specific death or not,
Our grief could not keep up. It’s been too much,
for too long, and we have lost our ability
To care too deeply, to generate fresh grief
for each new day and each new statistic.
We have lost our sense that each statistic is a person.
To protect ourselves, we have let go of feeling too much.
(selah)
For a while, the pandemic felt like a giant “pause” button
had been pushed, and we were simply waiting
for things to go back to normal.
But then we realized: “normal” is never going to come back.
What was “normal” before is now abnormal,
and we can’t keep waiting.
So we have lost our sense that life will return to the ease
we now appreciate about the time before:
When we breathed each other’s air without fear,
when we hugged each other’s bodies with such joy,
When we greeted friends and strangers with handshakes,
when we could smile with our unmasked mouths
and put people at ease with kind faces and kind words.
We have lost our facial expressions for
the communication of our common humanity.
We have lost our friendliness, our willingness
to share space and share food and share singing and share laughs.
Nothing feels easy. We are not at ease.
We are easing into a new normal, but it has been so hard.
(selah)
We have lost our social networks,
the daily food of friendship.
People we took for granted,
the ones we saw every day at school or at work,
They are vanished. Or they’re on the screen,
which is just not the same.
We have lost sitting close to someone we like.
We have lost whispering a secret in someone’s ear.
We have lost the sweet smell of sweat and shampoo
in someone else’s hair.
We have lost the clamor of the cafeteria
and the mall and the playground.
We have lost going to the teacher’s desk for help.
We have lost helping a friend keep up with the reading.
We have lost sports and clubs and tutoring and proms,
pep rallies and parties and competitions and graduations.
We have lost our youth, the growing up
we were meant to do together, side by side.
(selah)
There was a time we planned meticulously
for the future, for our children’s futures.
But this year has made a farce of our plans;
the future is fuzzy at best, foreboding and full of fear.
What kind of world did we inherit from our parents?
What kind of world are we leaving for our children?
We have lost our confidence that things get better and better;
we have given up optimism, and not just for Lent.
We have lost our sense that parents can protect kids,
or that kids can protect parents,
That vigilance and valor are the only ingredients
we need to guarantee a good life for those we love.
We have watched our leaders at every level
try to lead and fail, or fail to try at all,
Leaving each of us on our own to figure out
how to take care of ourselves,
learning personal best practices, alone.
If we had any left, we have lost our sense that
the institutions our parents and grandparents built
had a plan, or had a heart, or had our best interests at heart.
(selah)
This virus, and the political upheaval in our country,
and the ongoing demonstration of white supremacy
and racism in this country –
These have conspired together to dissolve the ties
that once bound us together.
We have lost our membership in the one human family.
We float away from each other, free of the gravity of love.
We have stayed home and stayed apart for so long,
we’re afraid we won’t know how
to be with people when it’s time again.
We have lost the ability to talk with each other
across our differences.
We have lost our deep-rooted sense of solidarity
with our neighbors, even though
We are all suffering the same things,
slogging through the same shit.
We wake up tired every day.
We lay awake sleepless every night.
Our bodies ache, though we are not sick,
or are we? We’ve lost our ability to know for sure.
We want to pray, but we can’t;
we long to worship, but we don’t.
We used to feel God peeking over our shoulder.
We used to smile at Jesus in the passenger seat.
But mostly now we don’t. The closeness of God
is lost to us, most days.
(selah)
And so we have named our losses,
the best we can.
You’re invited to tell us what you’ve lost
in this season, in the comments,
So we can acknowledge your loss
and sit with you in its absence.