Night Story

Your eyes open.

And the shadows

In the sleeping house

Unfurl themselves,

And bow noiseless down

Before you, a grace

To gild the edges of

Your pathway down the hall.

Outside, the years

Swirl

And gather beneath the oaks,

And wait for the curve

Of your hand to rest

Upon the storm door handle.

An age is ending, 

Tonight.

You move, out into it:

The same warm dark

You found at the foot

Of your parents’ porch;

The same sourceless glow,

Not quite moon or lamplight,

That you found bleeding

From around each edge

And black branch once hung above you.

The streets and the houses are thinning

With each step,

And the fabric

Between what you have known

And what you have glimpsed,

And wondered at,

And guessed.

And now, the fields:

The leaves driven into them,

And the wind,

The outline of the forest edge

Before you

And the years turned to their every second,

And your life a slight Aurora

In the corner of your children’s sky.

Hill-walking at night

Is careful work:

The feet remembering

Steps they have not known.

The starless sky makes that sound:

A ringing wholeness

That calls out and welcomes home.

The tired world sighs,

And in its sighing

Unscrolls traces

You remember knowing, but lost

Like a dream to the morning

In your sea of reachings

And sadnesses.

And now, suddenly, they are here,

Forming before your waking eyes

In the age that is ending in this night,

Among your years that gather, embarrassed

Beneath the trees,

And the humble shadows

That bow and flee from underneath your feet,

Within the dim, but deep and sourceless light – a hand

That leads you on

Into the woods.

Here, at the edge of all things that wait,

And hold themselves blameless

Before the throne of God,

You leave behind all manner of

Flickering, fleeting light:

A screen door standing open in an empty house,

Taking to it the gathering dark of October and its fallen leaves;

Your childhood church,

Its blurry springtime windows and dead pastors;

Your owned and endless miles of thick, steel track lifted up —

Lifted up 

From upon the earth,

Caressed into thin, molten, delicate thread

By the Maker’s hand,

And lovingly cut.

Theory and Grace

The noise of string theory drags itself

Along eternal lengths

Of leaf edge.

It has no God.

No small town along great rivers.

No barn-side in dusk

Painted with the hope

Of 1889.

No arm-length recollection

In cornfields.

No spring-nights bowed low.

No pre-dawn hunt for snakes among cousins

And blood brothers.

One wonders what its peace is worth.

How many bushels? How many miles? How many troublesome hives?

How many days?

How many alleys, traces

Stacked with straw, Rye, and gold?

It is a worrisome risk — the hope that rural pens inscribe

Across the face of doubt and science:

The untenable weight of faith.

All that noise of shoreline, siding, airfield is

Simple sawtooth:

Cicada-wing describing

And meaning

A walk

Along the purple lines

Of freight maps and flight plans

And clover-lit fields in dusk.

I did dream of Isaac on the altar, once;

I stood up straight

Among the pines, in the night,

And then collapsed with no legs beneath me

In impassable February fields.

But Abraham’s God is not a God of sleep,

And every silence is a journey,

And every journey

Worth its weight in blood

Trails an umbilical churchyard

Through the snow;

A short saga —

A wilderness myth

Swollen with

Footfall and bear-step and spark-speak

Regarded well

Near each ocean,

Honored well among effigy mounds

And jamborees

And camp nights

And dead vacation Bible school friends.

I have tried —hard —

To make it less,

But life

Is a lesson

Of vagrants and vagrancies.

I know

(And more to the point,

The stars, the moon, the North —)

That the galaxy

Matters less than

Lengths of bannock in rainless nights

Wrapped like snakes around green sticks,

Or fire — the surface and the edge of prophecy

Pried with penknife up

From underneath bark.

It’s an old muscle-memory:

Wait. Hope. Kneel. Pray.

Watch the tall grass sway.

It is nearly nothing,

The way the ages

Make their way around the gorgeous curves and distances and kiss

Old-man horizon.

Money will not pay

For the dry sand beneath the fire —

Nor time;

Experience;

Or lessons learned.

Grace gives that.

Sweet grace

That kneels along the unmarked ways;

That burns its hands cupping coals

You left untended in your sleep

In weather and long night;

That whispers you awake

On cold plains in the unspeakable, terrible night,

Pulling the cushion of its scars

Along the ridgeline

Of your face.

R.I.P. R.E.M.

I remember when my friend Roger brought his copy of "Chronic Town" to school so that I could sneak it home and give it a listen. (That sort of music and album art being frowned upon in our house at the time. And thanks, Roger, for REM, Love and Rockets, Husker Du, The Church, and The Chameleons, among others.) I was not immediately enthralled with "Wolves, Lower," and lifted the needle halfway through the song. But three seconds into "Gardening at Night," I was hooked - bad. There was a time when I considered REM my favorite band. That time was well in the rearview by the time the horror of "Shiny Happy People" came along and Michael Stipe started actually stringing full comprehensible sentences together in interviews. But in those early years, Stipe's mumbled, impressionistic ramblings draped over beautiful jangly guitars and tight American rhythms moved in and out of my days and nights like a weird, seamless, subconscious soundtrack. Those times are slipping into a Gaussian-blurred and faded snapshot of recollection these days, but that doesn't diminish the brilliance and audacity of musical art so simultaneously intricate and simple that it stands unembarrassed among the greatest this nation has ever had to offer to the earth. So, because of that, today I'm a little sad. The harsh reality is, they should have called it quits a few albums ago. And everyone who's honest knows it. But the truth also is, they were once an American treasure.

"Trust in your calling, make sure your calling's true."

R.I.P. R.E.M.

Song for Early September

Summer’s last sigh
Bending low then lying down — lost
And unconcerned —
For the long, familiar sleep
Of iced shores
And dark, lovely spaces
That find themselves beneath
Tree-fall and trestle;

Leaves
That crowd riverbanks:
That bruise the traces
And railways and blacktop with thick gold
And thin red,
And hesitate and shake
In air and light too suddenly cold
For short sleeves or laughing out loud;

The truth of what is
Pulled from last year’s threadbare
Coat sleeves and pockets
And given to the wind
And the present dusk
Sliding slowly down from
Hat to boot
Where shoulders end
And prairies launch themselves
Unembarrassed
Upward
To the nameless sky
And outward
To the yearless horizon.

I come by these things honestly,
Stumbled upon in early fall.

When my years are
As weary as my miles,
And never far
From the edge-lands of fire
That stand
Against armies of unseen eyes.

When all things are edge, and canvas, and slate.

When lift bridges still,
And all crossings grow as silent
As the space between the stars,
And the time for listening, watching, waiting
Has passed.

Lines Composed on a Balcony Near a Tourist Trap

The glass of the lake
whispers memories,
centuries; a dream
spelled out in wave-song.

I've moved alongside
Beneath the thick stars;
Wrapped in the coal-black;
Held in the Big Hand.

I have seen figures
At the ends of roads -
Hundreds of years old -
Whispering questions;

The ancient questions
My feet asked the earth.
What are the waves worth?
Where are the seraphs

Beneath each surface?
The waves are silent.
The silhouettes fade.
The black of the night

Pivots once, then stills.
The trees near the lake:
They have no questions.
Nor the dead brakemen;

Nor the dead sailors
Whose feet wandered here,
And who gave sweethearts
No warning, but left

The night to its own;
The dark between stars
To converse with leaves,
And in their silence -

Together embraced -
Watch each ember fade.

The Light

And when the sun is chisel to horizon’s stone,
Atrophied two-lanes
Grow effigy;
And lakes, and seas of sawgrass, and shoreline shadows
Take the wind, the waves, the years,
The Grace of God
And figure in the longing eye
Bent trees; misremembered maps;
The honesty of firelight.

Unsettled dreams of hope
Fold starlight and
Companion darkness into
Shapes of hands
Holding coffee cup and pipe;
Hands holding hands holding hands
In Prairie School decades
Hollowed in the ends of
Probation halls and harbor towns in dusk.

Deep In the imagined chest
Are piles of flint and charred bird-bone;
Circles of abandoned ash.

In dreamed mornings, quiet feet whisper
And toss coffee into weeds;
Crouch;
Face west for a while;
Move against the wind and
Kick sand upon the rail to still the coasting car.

There is no complication in it.

Grace, peace, justification:
All dirt in hair; blood on hand;
A whispered sermon
Embarrassed
By the way
Sons cling to their father
When the wind is loud
And murderers knock on the windows of the night.

The open door and lit light at the end of hard roads in the fall.

The Apocrypha of hope.

The laughter and the back-slap of strangers.

The safety thumbed
On the automatic knife.

Faces put hard to constellations.

The end of the line
And what comes after.

The light

The light

The water

The steel

Worn silver by wheels.

Fire

Fire is important.

In every honest man
An ancient thought flickers
And makes him lean forward.

Cautionary tales
Are told in shadow,
Cast against stone walls and leaning timber.

Confusion; anger; fear; woundedness;
And all manner of self-having —
Pillars of heartfelt honesty, all.

But young men must be taught:

There is no negotiation
In fire; in warmth; in keeping.

Every man who
Buckles his children into car seats
Or weighs vocation against calling
Must have at the ready
A plan of some kind
For producing fire against the cold

Should there come the suddenness of
Impassable roads in winter;

A season of ditches;

The hungry eyes of clever wolves;

The long and empty night
Of missed trains.

Fear is fine then,
But hands must move,
Find pockets full of tinder and spark,
And pathways forward through the dark.

You will write the epic poem after;
Feel the feelings, face the facts;
Paint the painting; sing the song
Of shepherds singing
As each demon is repulsed, vanquished
To the inner layers of hell itself;

But first — always first —

Fire. Fire against the night.
Fire against the jungle walls.
Fire against the truth of your own failing.
Fire against the faults of plans unraveled,
And dreams dried up.
Fire against embarrassments,
And the wisdom of this fatherless world
That has never been your friend.

Your first duty is to hope,
Always— always —
Hope, and grace, and truth, and love,
And the light they pour
Into the dark.

You must learn to stir embers
And converse with others near the gold-lit edges
While the ones you love are sleeping.

You must learn to laugh when nothing near you laughs
And other things are seething.

A list of things to know about fire:
It is not it’s own reward.
It does not fill accounts or reward performance.
It does not thrive on desire or good intentions.
It does not survive because of fame, or power, or wealth, or good standing.
It does not derive itself from you, but lives in spite of any striving.

It respects a pocket full of cotton swabs and water-proof matches
More than it will ever respect you,
The miles you drag behind you like a pile of chains,
Your weariness,
Or the beauty of your baby son, the goodness of your wife.

Considered Birds

All the birds of the fields consider me,
My posture;
My approximations.

They bathe, half-attendant.

From puddles,
They observe.

I pull my weight upward
Against a lattice of sunlight.

I cough
Ruined engines,
Haul them from my pockets;
Drop them on the shore
Of blacktop meeting shoulder.

The weight of their absence
Describes a golden circle
Around each graveled foot.

God wonders, then,
What weight remains in my shoes
When each step
Pulls a clutch of root and soft tissue from the earth.

I wonder if birds know sadnesses,

Or only differences

In slants of light and shadow;
The presence of passing where
None is normally found.

Then again, in far-apart counties,
Where barn-sides and tree-haunted silos
Lean against our decades,
These endless nights are only moments
To the fields, the mills and rail beds, neighborhoods,
Meanderings
That pass beneath each wing and life-thin clavicle.

I dreamt on my feet, often,
While passing through;
Dreams of barbicans holding moments to themselves.
Dreams of intermingled names
And avenues,
A complication of trackage rights;
An excited dread
Of distant mountains rising up against
The drought of flatlands and horizon
Heading west. And me in no way ready.

When those dreams came, I learned
To shake myself awake
And simply drop. I learned to stare at birds,
Unnerve them in the dawn.

Those well-considered birds
Then rose up unannounced and moved among the clouds
And gathered
Onto the rooftops of houses I have never owned,
Outside of windows never mine.

Their wings were cirrus clouds the clear moon
Shone through;
Stealed away through;
In times and places
Where journeys
Through the wilderness are not necessary,
Shining in the rain through safety glass,
And very far away.

It’s as wearisome, as good,
As anything else planned all along in the mind of God
While we were alone, in the dark,
And had no control of our arms, our legs.

For Jack

Good Friday,
I received this boy
Into my arms,
Straightened my spine
And remembered
Christ’s suffering;
Seraphs’
Illumined hands clamoring
In blind panic
After rebirth –
After the remaking
Of the tired earth;
Gasping, confused,
And undone
All together
In whatever one calls the disbelief
That angels
Pocketed
Upon the audacious reordering of all things,
When God’s great back
Turned shadow to his Son.

(You, boy, had better not ever know
The wanderings and thicknesses I have known.
You had better not:
I already love you so.)

Standing here at last
Above Joliet’s sweet entropy,
I remember for you
Pasts thick with
Sunday schools spilled out onto spring lawns
Near Easter,
When truth was simple
And words filled themselves
With only their own elegant meaning.

I have lived long enough to know
That your eyes see only shadow and shape,
And cannot read yet
Your own father’s scars.

So I stand near this window,
In this golden moment,
And take your impossibly small
Hand into my well-weathered own.

Together
We trace each unfolding river bed, two-lane,
And rail line
Silently,
Smiling, in the moment shared between us.

We understand each other then, don’t we?
While your wild, wondering, wandering eyes
Find mine?

You are good as gold;
Precious as any sunset
Held precipice
Above the Crucifixion;
Precious as any soul
I would set alight,
Or give up willingly to perdition
In the great jungle transit
Of this world; its passing
Into emptiness.

You sigh a new little boy’s sigh
Into the ether.
I gather an old man’s list of failings,
Wanderings, remembrances, follies
Into a collective of dust-strewn weeds
Along a sunlit siding.

And I give it all to you.

It is all I am, all that I will ever be,
And all I have to give.
It is my light in the sky; my wisdom;
My love; my answer; my question
That will one day lead you to
Sunlit lawns behind the church
In spring;
To know your Savior and embrace Him
In the foolishness
That brings joy;
That reveals pathways
In the endless fields,
The endless forests,
The endless seas,
And leads you to remember,
One day, distant, (so distant)
The way my calloused hand
Felt in your new hand
On this day in April,
When we understood
Each other
The way the angels
At last
Understood the need
For Christ’s own
Death;
Christ’s own
Resurrection;
Christ’s own
Life;
New
Life.

Courage

(For Kathy)

I will try my best to be slow-eyed
And level;
Carried and cared-for
Even as I carry and care for
All that has been given me,
All that has been granted.

“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home,”

A cadence I have memorized
And whispered back
To shoreline, shoulder,
And hungry night, aching, full
Alive with both absence and presence.
I am trying
To give this same, simple wisdom
To you, this night:
Do not give —
(Don’t you dare give) —
Any more darkness
To the space between the stars
Than they have given you.

We gathered around your dining room table that certain night
And you telegraphed warnings.
You were quietly guarding
Your sister’s heart, and I shivered,
Watching you watch me.

Later, I won you over,
(Thank God)
Hinting at the way one
Conducts oneself in certain sidings
When the grainers coast like ghosts
And the bulls beat the night
And the bushes
With their Maglites.

You laughed that certain way
That understood the way I laughed.

Years later,
We hiked the ravine behind your house.
You held my son’s hand
And steered him well clear
Of ticks and poison ivy.
You won me over
(Thank God)
When you let him run ahead,
But kept close behind.
As the shadows grew long
And the sun dipped below the trees,
You called him to you
Before he knew that he was scared.

In certain asides,
We have sipped wine,
Together, you and I,
And stared obliquely
At the absurdity of it all,
And agreed upon certain finalities.

Tonight, I pray you understand:
I am pushing aside your mother, husband, brother —
Even sister —
To look you in the eye
The way that you looked into mine
That night;
To hold your shoulders
And say,
“Courage catching out,
Courage coming home.”

James and Kevin Get Robbed at Gunpoint

So, I don't get many requests for narrative retellings, outside of my kids. (Who are usually more than satisfied with anything I can make up on the spot that involves monsters who are scared of little boys, or the time I replaced the timing chain on the Honda and forgot to torque the crankshaft pulley bolt.) But there are a few things that friends and family have asked me to recount in writing that for one reason or another I've tended to avoid. Among them: The first time I hopped a train; my "road name" (Do I have one? What is it? How did I get it?); "Cuban cigars"(severely abbreviated version available here: https://portal.tiu.edu/uportal/tcphilosophy/cigarcw); and ... James and Kevin get robbed at gunpoint. This is a hasty recounting of the latter.

It was December of 2000, the day after Christmas. Or maybe two days. Pretty sure it was the 26th. I had recently returned from one of my "amorphous wanderings" and at the behest of my mother had agreed to spend at least Christmas and a couple of days at my parents' house. I don't remember if I called James, or if he got in touch with me, but one way or another we agreed that we ought to touch base before the new year.

I pause here to say a word about James. It's somewhat important to the narrative, for reasons that will hopefully become clear. James and I have been friends for a long, long time. I grew up in a neighborhood where there were no other boys my age: None. But I had the good fortune of having James's grandparents living next door to me, so James visited often, and at least once or twice a week I was given the glorious opportunity to partake in that particular brand of chaos that only little boys can generate. (I am well-acquainted with this chaos: Grand fate has determined that my good wife and I should be blessed with naught but a sea of XY-chromosomal knuckleheads in our house.) Over the course of time, James and I seem to have developed some sort of bizarre, Jake-and-Elwood, Vulcan mind-meld ... thing.

Anyway.

So James has always been this "come what may" character in my life: "What if the fire gets out of control?" ("It won't, because it's too wet for that to happen."); "What if rat patrol catches us with the truck when we're not supposed to have it?" ("We asked Doug and Pam if we could take the truck and they said it was fine."); "What if we fall out of the tree?" ("The tree limbs are like stair-steps -- it won't happen, no matter how windy it gets."); "Hey ... those sounded like gunshots." ("Probably.")

But circumstances had conspired to muck things up some: I was recently divorced and feeling a bit ... "red-eyed, stamping at the dirt, and nothing to lose." I'd recently learned to get up my guts to do things like hop on grain cars, turn awkward conversations with knife-wielding and belligerent half-drunk transients into weepy-eyed philosophy discussions, and carry a half-gallon of good water next to my person, always, no matter what. I learned that "West is dead and north is nice," and (somewhat inconveniently, given that last truism) that "North isn't always north." Too much whiskey, too much pipe tobacco ... shaking, crying, confessing streams of secrets to people with names like "The Texas Madman." There's nothing at all poetic about it now, I admit, but I swear it was grace all the same.

Anyway.

It was the night after Christmas, I believe, and James and I were walking. Let's say that I (and I alone) was smoking a great big, giant, conspicuously obvious and gloriously stinky Cuban cigar. We're walking, talking ... and in the street-lamp light a block ahead of us, I see two dark figures walking slowly, deliberately down the middle of the street toward us. So here is where things get interesting. James seems to notice them as well, but continues his nonchalant conversation, gloriously receptive to grace and God's pre-destination. I on the other hand am thinking, "Those sons-of-bitches have nothing at all good in mind." And in that moment, the following three reactions took place within me simultaneously: (1) We're two blocks between my parents' house and the Van Enks' old place; if we cut the chatter, bolt now, and start hopping fences we'll be safe and sound; (2) we have the shadows and they've got light in their eyes, lamp-lit like stars on a stage -- if we hit the ground now -- right this second -- we'll disappear; (3) I don't want James to think I'm afraid. Ah, good old pride. I'd spent the last three years trying to prove my fearlessness to an absent audience, and I just couldn't stop. Clearly, I hadn't learned to finesse the details between courage and stupid recklessness. And my best friend and I were about to pay the price for that.

The conversation ambled forward, and James and I did as well, relentlessly closing the space between ourselves and the two men walking down the middle of the street. As we grew closer, I observed the posture of the two men: The tall one had his hands jammed in his coat pockets, head down; the short one walked with his back arched, head held high, marching. Not good. As we drew parallel to each other, the short one said, "How are you two gentlemen doing this fine evening?" And my heart sank. Here we go. Any doubt I'd had about how this evening was going to end evaporated in an instant. Although we have never talked about it since, I have to believe that at this point even James understood that he was about to have an "experience." For my part, my thoughts went from "bloodless robbery" to "dead friends." I wondered what my mom would say to Ron Magers; how long it would take for my girlfriend to hear the news.

We continued walking, and at some point I actually closed my eyes and began praying, "Please let it pass, please let it pass, please ...." And then we heard the shouting: Non-descript yelling. For a split-second, I thought these two were staging some sort of fight with each other. Maybe they were drunk, or high. Maybe I was wrong. But no. The short one was marching toward us, presently, his hand extended, gun in hand. He was much closer than I'd anticipated. I don't know what made me look, but I saw the tall one dive into the driver's seat of a car parked alongside the road. How long had they been watching us? Just how orchestrated was this offense? I don't remember the exact words he used, but we were instructed to stop in our tracks. Somewhere in there, an order to let him see our hands was registered. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw James put his hands in the air. I was stuck in the moment. I was still trying to figure out the best way to approach this. While I was treasuring all of this away in my heart, the short one was marching steadily forward, small-caliber gun now pointed directly at my face. "I SAID show me those hands!" Ah. My hands were still jammed into my coat pockets; the fire-red cherry on the end of my Cuba-via-Winnipeg cigar still glowing happily in the post-yuletide night. And now the short one was marching blindly, angrily across the urban landscape, over curbside and storm sewer, rapidly and madly closing the distance between us, that black barrel now painting its shadow on my forehead. And I thought about the time James and I were shooting his dead father's guns out in Beecher, and I held that double-barrel 10-gauge that he liked to call "The Hammer," with both triggers cocked, when my foot caught a clog of mud in the field and I let both barrels go in one whisper-thin finger twitch, launching two heavy, solid-lead slugs not more than four feet in front of me. Such a hole in the heavy autumn earth they made. I imagined what my head would look like in the morning after the short one's careless, twitchy finger let adrenaline change his life and mine forever. I wondered what my father would tell my mother to give her peace.

And just like that, I was close enough to the short one's gun underneath the lamplight to be able to accurately describe it as a .25-caliber pistol to the police. My hands finally found their way into the air. "Throw your wallets on the ground!" we were told. Easy enough. "And there better be money in there or I'll kill you, both of you!" Oh. Well, now, there's a problem. I'd gotten out of the habit of carrying cash. Or, for that matter, I.D. Both were inconvenient freight when on the road. I honestly had no idea how much cash -- if any -- I had in my wallet. Three dollars? Maybe two. Wallets on the ground, now, the short one crouches down to begin examining the spoils. As he does so, I watch the gun carelessly slant this way and that, angled always toward my head. "Get out of here!" the short one barks. James and I begin backing away. Ah, sweet impotence. "What are you walking for? run ... RUN, motherfuckers!"

Well.

For a moment, I experienced a feeling I didn't recognize again until many years later, the first time one of my boys looked me square in the eye and said, "NO!" when I told him to do something. That "motherfuckers" was simply not necessary. I even made a point to tell the police afterward that the short one was left-handed, and had conspicuously avoided profanity. Until the end. Guns in faces, barked orders, careless trigger fingers ... but humiliation for humiliation's sake? Hadn't I lost enough face, already? Good God ... what more? Just how humble did I have to be? Abandoned for another man; no wealth, no ambition, no cash, no cache ... I brought three dollars and no I.D. to the table, and gave it all, and now the last of my dignity as we ran, James and I, through the night back to my parents' house. They thought we were joking when we burst through the door and I exclaimed, "Give me the phone! We've been robbed at gunpoint!" They laughed. Such a joke.

James went home to his good wife and a warm bed. I couldn't sleep in my childhood bed, alone, and ended up on the floor, blanketless and cold. I awoke at dawn and told God and the streets that they'd have to do better if they were going to upstage the terror of limb-severing boxcars silently gliding through the yard. And I marched the streets indignant and ugly until I found James's wallet, cashless but otherwise intact. My wallet was retrieved the night before by a neighbor. Two dollars were still safely ensconced therein. I like to think they knew they'd be drinking damnation upon themselves had they taken it. I like to think the short one saw my eyes.

So, what did I earn? What have I carried forward? In the most practical sense, I've learned to listen to that relaxed voice of reason that most of us ignore. When it's past eleven, and I've buttoned up the exhaust manifold, but that one stubborn bolt won't cooperate ... I stop. There's time for a glass of Scotch and a short conversation: It isn't worth a wrist and a paid-for family car to force my pride in the moment. After that night, I was much more introspective about the difference between "fearless" and "foolhardy." Many of the things I'd been routinely doing up until then suddenly seemed horrific and irresponsible. I had an alarming sense of responsibility to my undefined future, and the people who lived and loved there.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday comes and goes most years with little notice. Maybe you make your way up the concrete stairs to your cubicle in the morning, and you’re startled to see the imprint of ash on the forehead of a Catholic coworker. Ah. It’s Ash Wednesday, isn’t it? Or perhaps, like me, you log onto Facebook and see this, from a friend: “Knows that Ash Wednesday takes on new poignancy when one has the ashes of their child sitting on a shelf. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.” Indeed.

(And isn’t it strange how, before I awoke to the realization of the liturgical significance of the day, my wife and I in one accord thought we ought to head out one of these days to Resurrection Cemetery to visit our lost baby’s grave?)

Being a solidly half-Dutch product of the Evangelical Free Church in America, I am no scholar of the traditional liturgical calendar. (Until Wikipedia explained otherwise this very day, I thought Shrove Tuesday and Fat Tuesday were different days in separate weeks.) Sure, there’s Palm Sunday — replete with the congregation’s kindergarten faction parading down the church aisles carrying palm fronds and marching to the strains of “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus” — and obviously Easter, but Ash Wednesday … well, what’s a good protestant to do with *that*?

From what I’ve heard about Ash Wednesday, it seems that people either view it as an opportunity to prove to God a willingness to deny themselves one comfort or another as a nod to the way Jesus denied his own divine nature so that he might voluntarily suffer and die for our sins, or … as an acknowledgement of the weight and reality of death in our lives: “We are dust, and to dust we shall return.” Leaving aside for the moment the valid argument that the two views are in no way mutually exclusive, I cast my vote for the latter. The way I see it, before you can hope to in any way “identify” with the suffering of Christ, you need to be very clear on what your status is without his intervention. And that status is, dust … mud … nothing to speak of. After every grand argument; after every well-told story; after every Oscar nomination, every Nobel Prize acceptance speech; every standing ovation, every “journey of self-discovery” … the yawning emptiness of the grave awaits.

And that’s that.

The wages of sin is death. And who of us does not sin? And what is death but the reduction of all of our consequence to dust, ash … the return of our physical presence in this place and time to meaninglessness?

And now our formerly benign “Ash Wednesday” comes into sharp focus. The reality of this day, I think, is not best spent pretending that by somehow denying ourselves that slice of pizza, that swig of Scotch, that piece of chocolate, that we’re somehow communing with the Son of God. I think the time is better spent considering what life and death look like without the infusion of grace that God gives: “A meaningless movement; a movie script ending.” We are dust. We’re a vapor. Ah … but with an asterisk. The story of Lent is a story full of hopeful — and foreboding — foreshadowing: The Good News is that Ash Wednesday is meaningless outside of the dark shadow of Good Friday and the blinding light of Easter.

When I see myself graveside, grief-laden and barely able to push the top of my head upward against the falling rain, yes, I do find comfort in seeing Jesus there, head hung low and hiding a smile. “Just wait … it’s only dust, but dust isn’t what it used to be any more.”