CREEDE HINSHAW: Mortality and mortification

The first day of Lent came on March 1, Ash Wednesday. I sat in the silent sanctuary waiting for the evening service of penitence to begin. The children of the church had gathered in the worship space for their own simple Ash Wednesday service and I watched them, some as young as 5 years old, kneel at the wooden rail surrounding the altar and receiving ashes on their forehead.

When I was serving as pastor, it was always quite jarring to place ashes, the sign of the cross, on the foreheads of these mostly innocent children and announce to them, “From ashes you have come and to ashes you shall return.”

But it is a good thing in our own way and at our own level of understanding to acknowledge that we are mortals. We are people headed for death. Life does not last forever. Immortality – whatever that signifies – is reserved for an experience on the other side of death.

We mostly live in a death-denying (and sometimes death-defying) society. The cover of the most recent Forbes magazine features the photo of a stern capitalist who has raised $300 million to figure out a way to drastically prolong life. The headline beneath his piercing gaze is “How to Cheat Death.”

I don’t need to read the article to know the answer: it’s impossible.

Related to the word “mortal” are the words “mortify” and “mortification.” These words carry a sense of being deeply wounded, ashamed, sickened unto death by a particular behavior, attitude or thought. And on this first week of Lent, it occurs to me that not only do we want to avoid mortality, we also want to avoid mortification.

We are hardly ashamed of anything anymore. There is almost nothing that makes us blush, grimace or feel deeply wounded by our own thoughts or deeds. About the most we get these days is a shrug of the shoulder, a yawn, or maybe the kind of sorrow that is expressed like this, “I’m really sorry if you misunderstood something that I said.”

Nobody wants to live in constant sorrow, guilt or grief. But there is such a thing as godly sorrow. And Lent is the season to discover, or rediscover, this heavy heart. It is a time for contrition, for reflection, for silence. It is a time to remember that we are mortal.

To acknowledge that a person is human, after all, is not such a bad thing to remember. It might even help one to accept him or herself as a flawed child of God, created in the image of the divine but also created in dust, incapable of perfection.

To obsess over one’s sin is not what God wants for us. But to be oblivious to one’s sin cannot lead to health, to healing or to salvation. Come, mortals; our mortality should ever be before us. Let us these 40 days cast ourselves, personally and as a church, upon the grace of God, that Easter may dawn gloriously.

Email columnist Creede Hinshaw at [email protected].