What Remains Will Feed the Roots

Dear All Souls,

Julian of Norwich once wrote of holding something no bigger than a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. She was shown that it was “all that is made.” It seemed so small. So easily crushed. And yet she understood that it endures and ever shall, because God loves it.

Ash feels like that.

Dust feels insubstantial in our fingers. When we are told, on Ash Wednesday, that we are dust and to dust we shall return, it can sound like diminishment. A narrowing. A reminder of limits we would rather not face.

Earlier this week, a clergy friend in our diocese sent me a draft of their Ash Wednesday homily. As I read it, something in my imagination quietly shifted. Much of what follows, I owe credit to them.

They described what happens when wood is burned all the way down. What remains is not empty residue. The ash that settles carries within it the very elements that nourish soil. It strengthens roots. It supports flowering. It steadies ground that has grown too sharp or depleted. It loosens heavy clay so that air and water can move again. Even what threatens growth is held at bay by its presence.

Ash, they wrote, is what remains after something has been fully given.

And what remains becomes nourishment.

Nothing is wasted.

I realized how much I have often heard Ash Wednesday as warning. But what if it is also preparation? What if, when ash is pressed into our skin, we are not only being reminded of our mortality, but being marked for growth?

Remember you are dust.

And perhaps also: this remembering will feed what comes next.

There is often a quiet resistance in us as Lent approaches. As though God were about to demand more willpower. As though something comforting will be taken away. As though this season were designed to expose what is lacking.

But Lent is not God tightening His grip.

It is God tending the ground.

The traditional practices of Lent are simple: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. They are not punishments. They are not spiritual self-improvement plans. They are ways of loosening the soil of our lives.

Prayer clears space for God’s presence rather than our noise. Fasting reveals what has quietly mastered us and gently displaces it. Generosity breaks up the compacted earth of self-protection. Each practice opens room.

Jesus is healer. He restores what has been fractured and seeks what has been misplaced. Jesus is sanctifier. He drives out what pollutes and names what is false, not to shame, but to make room for wholeness. And the filling of the Spirit is not a reward for effort. It is what happens when a life is brought back into alignment with Love. When God is given God’s way in us, God’s life fills what has been opened.

This is the integrating work of the God who makes things right.

The heart of Lent stands quietly against much of what American Christianity has become. We have often separated grace from belonging, faith from embodiment, God from neighbor. We have imagined church as a support structure for a private spirituality.

But church is not an accessory to your relationship with God.

Church is the relationship God is establishing in the world for the sake of the world. It is the Body of Christ gathered around the Body of Christ to baptize, pray, read, feast, and serve.

The aim of the Church, the aim of any practice or liturigical season is not training you to become better religious practitioners. God forbid.

The aim is an apprenticing into attentiveness. Into cooperation. Into the deep life of those who learn to recognize where God is already at work and consent to it.

Ash settles into the soil without striving. It becomes part of the ground from which something new will grow.

So we begin Lent not with fear, but with trust.

Let what must be refined, be refined.

Trust that even what feels small in your hands will endure, because it is held in God’s.

Peace and all goodness to you,

Bliss +