In late February 2004, I was a parish pastor preparing to preside over my congregation’s first-ever Ash Wednesday service.
Ash Wednesday is, of course, the day when more liturgical traditions observe the beginning of Lent, the 40-day season of preparation for Easter. It is the custom in many congregations to have a service in which the priest or pastor marks the foreheads of every person in attendance with ashes in the shape of a cross while saying the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is a solemn symbol of our lament over our past sins and our desire to turn to God for forgiveness and new life.
I had learned in my liturgics class that it is most appropriate that the ashes used on Ash Wednesday are from burnt palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday service. Since I was a new pastor in a congregation that had never observed Ash Wednesday, no one had kept palm fronds from the year before. I was confronted with a very practical challenge -- where does one get palm ashes on the day before Ash Wednesday?
I called one local Christian bookshop, but all of my liturgical brothers and sisters had already bought the shop’s supply. I called another Christian bookshop in the area that served a more evangelical clientele and was asked, “What’s Ash Wednesday?”
In desperation, I drove to the local big box home improvement warehouse, where I found potted living palm trees. I bought one and brought it back to the parsonage. I cut off branches and tried to light them on fire in a metal bowl in the parsonage sunroom.
Have you ever tried to burn green wood? It doesn’t burn; it produces an acrid smoke. As it wafted out of the parsonage windows, I saw it heading for my neighbor’s house. She was Southern Baptist and, after a few moments, phoned me to ask what I was burning. I told her palm branches for Ash Wednesday. She told me that if she ever smelled that smell coming from the parsonage again, she was going to call the sheriff.
Having no success burning the living palms and under threat of a visit from the sheriff, I abandoned my plan. I remembered that two of my members, Eddie and Melanie, had a wood-burning stove. I called them and asked if they would be willing to bring a bag of ashes to the service the next night. They did. Eddie and Melanie brought a garbage bag full of ashes to the church. (I neglected to mention that a Ziploc sandwich bag of ash would have been sufficient.)
Now, with an ample supply of ashes in hand, I confronted a new challenge -- how does one get the ashes to stick to people’s foreheads? I concluded that water was an essential ingredient in this mix. So about an hour before the service, I made a mud pie in the sacristy of that church, mixing ashes and water in a pie plate.
You might remember -- I didn’t -- that ashes plus water plus time is the chemical equation that produces lye. So, as the liturgy went by and I marked my congregation with the shape of the cross, I was rubbing lye on our foreheads. By the benediction, there was an unpleasant burning sensation; by the next morning, there was a painful red cross.
The following Sunday, several people told me we didn’t need to have an Ash Wednesday service ever again.
It is a painful memory in more ways than one, but I have thought a lot about that Ash Wednesday service in the decade since. For me, there is a valuable lesson in that day about leading with a beginner’s mind. That phrase, beginner’s mind, comes from Buddhism and speaks to a certain mindset that we must adopt, a mindset that lacks ego-driven assumptions and presumptions, a certain willingness to not know and to learn. It describes an open-hearted, open-minded disposition. It is another way of expressing what St. Benedict describes in his Rule that “always we begin again.” We are always in a process of not knowing and of learning, and the danger for us is in acting in self-protecting ways as if we already know everything we need to know.
Leading with a beginner’s mind is essential for clergy and for other leaders moving into new positions with new requirements. Seth Godin has written a book called “The Dip.” In it, he describes how people in the first weeks and months, even years, of trying new behavior or serving in new positions experience a noticeable decline in performance (“the dip”).
As we are learning, we are often less successful, less capable, less productive, but if we learn in and through the dip, we can become increasingly successful, capable and productive on the other side. Of course, the danger is that we experience the dip and give up, resigning ourselves to decreased performance and productivity.
In my first year in parish ministry, I wish that I had had the courage to keep a beginner’s mind. I wish that I had asked more questions and been less self-protective. I wish that I had realized that, for as much as I knew, there was still a great deal more that I needed to learn. I was going through the dip, and I didn’t know it.
I wish I had. On Ash Wednesday 2004, we all might have been spared some pain.
