Ash Wednesday and 'I'm Done With Snails'

A girl in the third grade begins a poem:

When my third snail died, I said,
'I'm through with snails.'

She was writing poetry because her class had been visited by the poet Kathleen Norris, who had moved to her grandparents home in South Dakota to write, to rediscover the Christian faith in small Protestant churches and a Benedictine monastery, and to help school children in those small Dakota towns to discover the arts.

Norris reflects on the way that death surrounds this girl who is writing the poem in class:

"She sits up to let me pass down the aisle, the visiting poet working with the third grade: in this dying school, this dying town, we are writing about our lives."  (Dakota, page 189)

This week, Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday we invite each other to look ahead to where Lent always leads. The cross. We make the sign of the cross on our foreheads, of all places, and we hear the words "from dust you were made, and to dust you will return." It is a reminder that we share in death that Jesus faced, or that Jesus shares in the death we all face.

Ash Wednesday is a powerful experience in our 2014 American culture, in which our tendency is to do everything we can to keep from thinking about death until the very last possible moment. And why not? Isn't it painful to be reminded of our mortality? Is it any wonder that the Ash Wednesday worship service draws so few of our regular worshipers in the Protestant tradition?

And yet, I find the reminder of our mortality, within the ritual safety and assurance of worship, to be just the opposite of grim. It doesn't make me morbid; it makes me more alive. It is a powerful reminder of the incredible gift that life is, and inspires me to re-focus, to re-connect with God, to repent of anything that keeps me apart from the deep life of following the way of Christ. Worship on Ash Wednesday is solemn, but it is not weighted by death.

Kathleen Norris writes "the little girl calls me, holding up her paper for me to read:
When my third snail died, I said,
'I'm through with snails.'
But I didn't mean it.