Spirituality for Solidarity.

If you have a high-speed internet connection, I invite you to watch at least the first minute of this video. In it, a British TV host puzzles over the mysterious black smudge on VP Joe Biden's forehead - a smudge people around the world received yesterday for Ash Wednesday.

The TV host is now receiving a royal ribbing in the British press, but we shouldn't be too hard on her. The black smudge is strange, after all.

I was reminded of this myself yesterday when we had several visitors from the neighborhood join us at St John United for our Ash Wednesday services. These visitors don't normally attend our Sunday services - though a few have visited on occasion. But for some reason, Ash Wednesday drew them in.

As I left worship that evening, I puzzled over this. Who knows what stories led them here? Maybe they grew up in a Christian faith, and remembered Ash Wednesday from their youth. Maybe they still found certain Christian rituals powerful, even if they'd left other rituals behind. Maybe they just work on Sundays, and were happy for a weeknight service to join our community at worship. Or maybe their stories are complicated and complex, multi-facted and mysterious: hard to pin down. Maybe they are just like us.

What is it that draws us - all of us - into these strange rituals?

Dean Brackley writes that (p.8)

...our lives are too rich for... ordinary common-sense discourse to encompass. If the holy Mystery called God pervades our lives, as I believe it does, then we need religious symbols to point to reality as it actually is. Without that language, we sell our experience short.

I imagine that, since you have found this blog, you probably agree, to some degree, at least.

And yet you likely also know that stepping into those symbols, approaching the holy Mystery called God through ancient rituals, annual or weekly, can be a dangerous thing. You never know where it will lead you. It might even lead you back out into the world.

Brackley writes:

We are more aware today of the social and institutional dimensions of our lives. Christians are more aware of the social implications of their vocation and the mission of the church. We are all more conscious of the scope of misery in the world, of the institutional mechanisms of injustice, and of the global dimension of our moral drama. Responding to massive injustice according to each one's calling is the price of being human, and Christian, today. Those looking for a privatized spirituality to shelter them from a violent world have come to the wrong place.

Can these rituals do this, too? Can they lead us ever deeper, not only into ourselves but into the world, into a relationship of serious solidarity with our suffering sisters and brothers, in our neighborhood and in the farthest reaches of the globe? Can a smudge of ashes on a forehead be a part of this?

We can only hope.

For a variety of reasons we come, looking for a variety of things. May God gather us up - our questions, our fears, our dreams, our hopes - and guide us out again. Amen.