Ash Wednesday 2010

I have always loved Ash Wednesday. Even during my years out of the Church (1984-1992), I found myself attracted to this day of solemn observance, of fasting, of accepting the imposition of ashes on one's forehead, of being reminded that "we are all in this together," as one human family -- blessed, and also sinful; loved, and also in need of repentance; treasured, and also mortal.
When I was a child & growing up Jewish, I always envied my Catholic schoolmates. Having been to early Mass with their parents & siblings, they would all come to our public school with ashes smudged on their foreheads and, it seemed to me, a secret to share. The secret wasn't what they planned to "give up" for Lent; they shared that freely, & most of them had chosen chocolate, or candy, or desserts. No, the secret was that they had embarked on a journey, a spiritual journey, with Jesus, and that this journey would end, after 40 days, with the glory of Easter: The Resurrection.
Today, for the first time in my life, I attended Ash Wednesday Mass and received ashes in my own home town (or city, being precise). I'd left Hartford at age 23, moving first to New York City and then to the San Francisco Bay Area. My surprise conversion to Catholicism & my baptism, confirmation, and receiving First Eucharist happened in California, & that was where I spent the first eight years of my life as a Catholic Christian. I attended Ash Wednesday liturgies at the Newman Center where I had been baptized, etc., or at the Catholic liturgy offered by one of the 3 Catholic seminaries of the Graduate Theological Union. Then, for a number of years, I was churchless by choice. When I made the decision to "return" to the Catholic Church, I'd moved to Boston; there, I attended the Paulist Center -- an intentional Catholic community -- or Dignity Boston, where I preached one Ash Wednesday. Most Ash Wednesdays at the Paulist Center for the past 10 or more years, I served as a lector, Eucharistic minister, and giver of ashes.

Today, in my new Hartford church, St. Patrick-St. Anthony, I had no liturgical role and instead sat in my wheelchair or knelt in a pew, and wept. I wept for my own sense of sin, my own knowledge that I have fallen far short of G-d's will for my life. I wept for so many who are right now in pain and in need, especially the people of Haiti, the poor of the Augustino in Lima, Peru, & the poor of my own city. I wept as I remembered people I loved who have died, and I wept for the dead of Haiti & El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Honduras, & Peru. I wept for the people I love & miss in my Paulist Center community in Boston, friends in the Bay Area, & friends all over this country & the world. And I wept in thanksgiving for the grace that the Lord has made known to me, has given me, & whatever grace, if any, the Lord has made manifest in & through me.

That, I believe, is what Ash Wednesday & Lent are about: Allowing G-d to enter / re-enter our lives so that G-d may make G-dSelf manifest in & through us. We need Ash Wednesday & Lent to clear away the cobwebs, the detritus, the accretions that have come to cling on & to us, & that we have come to cling to. Ash Wednesday & Lent offer us the time, space, & journey to reassess, to look again, to turn again -- teshuvah -- to recognize yet again that G-d's love for us, as manifest in Christ, offers us the most abundant life for which we could hope. Ash Wednesday & Lent give us the opportunity to rekindle the longing deep within us for G-d's grace & G-d's love in our lives; they give us the opportunity to re-ignite our longing to be able to discern G-d's will for our lives. And they offer us the chance once again to follow Jesus as the disciples we are called to be.

May a Deeply Blessed Lent fill you this Lenten Season.

Remembering Stuart Weiner

Twenty-seven years ago today, at approximately 5 pm, my friend Stuart Weiner died in a room at San Francisco General Hospital. Twenty-seven years ago, 10 February 1983 was a Thursday. The previous Saturday, 5 February, Stuart had gone with a friend into San Francisco for dinner to celebrate his 30th birthday that had occured several days earlier. The typical Bay Area winter rain obscured Stuart & his friend as they crossed Van Ness Avenue; the driver who hit them and sped away, however, must have known he hit at least one person. Stuart's friend, whose name I never knew, was not badly hurt. Stuart, however, sustained a severe contra-coup brain injury. When the trauma unit nurse showed me his EEG, I knew right away. Stuart had no brain activity; the flat line on the EEG indicated that he was, in fact, brain dead. A ventilator and other trauma unit machines to which he was connected were keeping his heart going, his lungs inflating & deflating.

That gave his parents the time they needed. Time for the news to sink in & take root that their son's brain injury was fatal; that he could not recover; that they would need to make what I believe was the most difficult decision of their lives -- to disconnect Stuart from the machines that were keeping his heart beating & his lungs breathing & to let him go, let him die, to say goodbye to their son.

Stuart had been an only child, adopted by his parents when they were older. He was raised Jewish, but he was a spiritual searcher; his searches led him first to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- the Mormons -- and then to the Roman Catholic Church. At the time of his death, he was preparing for baptism, confirmation, and first Eucharist as a Catholic. He was intellectually and artistically gifted, had a wide range of interests, hoped to finish his Divinity degree & then attend graduate school in clinical psychology. Stuart was very openly gay, frequently in & out of love, and so good-looking that he intimidated one of my closest friends, another gay man.

Because of our shared backgrounds in Judaism, Stuart & I shared a special connection, a special bond. We could say things to each other that no one else could understand, & we couldn't explain. That we were both "out," Stuart as a gay man and I as a lesbian woman, further connected us, as did the fact that I had converted a number of years earlier from Judaism to Catholicism. I was the sister he never had, and he was the brother I never had.

His death at age 30 still causes me tremendous pain; I still miss him. I believe & trust that he is among the Communion of Saints, and that helps to ease my grief somewhat. Still, I miss him. And I miss the friends who loved him, although, thanks to cyber-space, some of us are now in contact once again. I'm not able to draw any "lessons" from this anniversary, at least, not at the moment. I am, however, deeply grateful that the Holy One has given me the capacity to love as deeply as I do, and deeply grateful as well that, for a few short years, I was close friends with a wonderful, loving, caring man. May the Holy One hold Stuart's soul close; may the Holy One comfort all who grieve.