Paint It Black

Paint It Black
by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Ash Wednesday

I see a red door and I want to paint it black . . .

Have you ever seen so many tattoos? Tattoos have always creeped me out and I've never been sure why. Part of it, I'm sure is that I usually don't share the recipients' aesthetic sensibilities. Maybe part of it is that I can't figure out why, in a world where people are doing everything they can to shake off permanence - residences, marriages, etc. - there's this desire to walk around every day with a lasting impression that is often the result of impetuousness. But then, the other day, my friend Jim said something that crystallized it for me: "It's like throwing paint on a Rembrandt." That was it exactly! It's like people are trying to improve upon perfection.

Some four decades and change ago, when popular radio was filled with examples of "puppy love" and pleas that "I wanna hold your hand", the Rolling Stones came on the scene and threw paint all over the idea of a love song. Henceforth, an acceptable form of pouring your heart out could also involve turning your heart inside out, full of introspection and self-doubt, angst if not schadenfreude:

I look inside myself and see my heart is black . . .

In a way, that's what Lent invites us to do - to take time over the next forty days to evaluate our lives. We evaluate, first, our relationship with God. Then, we look at our relationships with others. And in both realms, we realize we are far from perfection.

We come forward today to receive the ashes. The ceremony is called the Imposition of Ashes, but I wonder if a more accurate name would be the Revelation of Ashes. As the pastor or priest touches our foreheads and says the sobering words, "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return," maybe what they are really doing is uncovering the mark that's been with us since the fourth chapter of Genesis. That's the first order of business today: we look inside ourselves and see that there is a profound blackness in our hearts.

But, thanks be to God, that's not where the story ends. There's another mark that is indelible, eternal, part of our very nature when our lives are given to Christ: "Lindsay Katherine, James David, Jan Marie, Matthew Ellis - you are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ's own for ever." They are the words spoken over us at our baptism and they trump everything else that we or the world or the devil may think about us.

That's the second order of business during Lent: find out what that wonderful truth means - that we are sealed and marked as Christ's own for ever. Get close to the Lord and stay there. In the words of Ephesians 5:10, "Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord."