lent
In the near-empty church that echoed with baby cries, the priest put ashes on Henry’s forehead (from dust you came to dust you shall return). Sin, the priest said, is anything that brings you further from your highest self. Henry hasn’t sinned. I’m not even sure if he is, by technical or philosophical definition, human — having no language or self-consciousness. I hated seeing the ashes on him. It felt like a marker for something I can’t imagine will ever happen. He’s still perfect. He is the opposite of sin: he brings us closer to our best selves (and, in his worst moments, he at least teaches me patience).
We came home and, over take-out thai food, which is perhaps the opposite of what one is supposed to eat on ash wednesday, we talked about sin. I daren’t share others’ perspectives on their sins, but it was a deep and powerful conversation. And it helped me to understand what sin is more deeply, apart from what anyone else might think–the sin is so particular to the person who feels burdened by it. My sin, I said, is that I get afraid: I get afraid of people, I get skittish, I like to stay in my house where it is safe. I get afraid of making art: it takes so much bravery to face a blank page and to write or make out of thin air. It’s easier to say I don’t have enough time, or to make something small, like a teeny tiny blog entry — which, I know, is something small that also accumulates, and I know that sometimes it takes bravery to write and then to hit that blue Publish button, but it hurts more to free-write: to go deep down and out and all over without any idea where I’ll land. I need the blindness of free-writing to push me to new territory everywhere else, but it’s sometimes tiring and dizzying.
Fear of people and fear of the page: both these fears repel me from accessing a deeper and calmer self. So for lent, I’m going to a new-mothers group in town, and for lent I’m free-writing for half an hour each day while Steve tends to Henry. I’ve often joked that Ash Wednesday is my favorite holiday, but it is: I love to think of us as dust. I love to scrub away the parts of myself that don’t add beauty. Though I did wipe the ash off of Henry’s forehead as soon as we stepped out into the night.
