Rev. Stephen Harding on that which comes from God

Understanding the Depth of What We Do

As an Episcopal priest, Ash Wednesday in the hospital starts early with phone calls: ‘Where can I get my ashes?’, ‘When are you coming with the ashes?’ are the recurrent questions throughout the day. On the floors, patients, staff, families, and delivery men swarm around, all wanting me and the other priests to dip our thumb into our container of ashes and then make the sign of the cross on their foreheads: “Remember that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.” For the first hundred or so, I am a priest, helping the faithful connect with the beginning of Lent. After a while, the volume of people becomes overwhelming, and this repeated act of making the sign of the cross on their foreheads becomes for me a meditation on the face of Christ. Young, old, infants, black, white, brown, yellow, straight, gay, lesbian, sick, well, staff, patient – each individual comes with expectation, with hope, and with longing to confirm their membership in the body of Christ. Each individual becomes for me the face of Christ and reflects Him back to me.

At the end of Ash Wednesday, I went with my wife to the Ash Wednesday service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We brought our seven-week old son, Theodore, with us, after a discussion as to whether we should wait until he was baptized, so that the oil of baptism would be the first liturgical act on his forehead. We heard a sermon from the Dean, in which he described he and his wife bringing their then newborn daughter to an earlier Ash Wednesday service and how initially frightening it was to hear “remember thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return” as ashes were imposed on her head – and then how reassuring it became as he and his wife realized that that which came from God will go back to God, at the end.

We thought this was totally apt, and the Dean’s words had great meaning for us as we brought our newborn son to receive his ashes for the first time. My wife, Storm, and I stood next to each other with our child between us as we presented him to the priest and to God. Afterward, with the feel of my own ashes on my forehead, I held my son. He was so small in my arms – the darkness of the ashes stood out on his forehead, and he looked so little.

Holding him in that context, I looked at him and was reminded of other newborns that I had visited in the hospital. These newborns were in the Neo-Natal ICU, and I had traced the sign of the cross on their foreheads. The difference was that the cross I had placed on their heads was the cross of baptism before they died, to seal and mark them as Christ’s own – for ever.

Holding my own son, he reminded me of these other infants’ deaths and I began to understand for the first time what I had done for those other infants and their families, and what my act of baptism had meant to them.

I felt that my child was safe - and I sensed also some of the enormity of other parents’ relief that their children, in a different way, were safe as well.

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