Black Belt Spirituality

So yesterday was Ash Wednesday.  For some of my Protestant friends, yes I agree, there is no biblical directive for us to celebrate Ash Wednesday. Just like there isn't a directive to celebrate Christmas or Easter. But there is at its core a great biblical theology of creation, sin, our mortality, grace and death.  It calls us to community in our shared brokenness and the humility of our mortality. As a Presbyterian and reformed theologian, I am glad I have added this practice to my spiritual life the last few years.  I have been lucky to serve in a healthcare setting for the last 5-6 years during Ash Wednesday. It is often said to be  the busiest day of the year for Chaplains. I argue it is, a hospital I served at imposed over 5 thousand ashes one year. This year, between 2 services and rounding my CCRC, I imposed well over 100 ashes. And I also served communion to two people in our nursing unit, a Lutheran and a Catholic. By the end of the day my hands were black and dusty,

A well known pastor and author recently asked  her twitter followers “what scene from a movie makes you cry every time you watch it?” Now, for me there are several; but one movie popped to the front of my brain. In the movie Gods and Generals, which chronicles the Civil War from 1861 to just before the battle of Gettysburg, there is a scene when Gen. Stonewall Jackson learns a young girl he befriended has died of scarlet fever. Receiving the news from his staff physician, Jackson walks to the edge of his camp and slumping on a stump in grief he cries a truly guttural cry and sobs uncontrollably. When questioned as to why he is crying now, after not crying for every single man whose death he has ordered, for every friend and cadet he has lost on the field of the battle, the physician answers “no, I think he is crying for them all!  Five years deep as a chaplain; there are deaths where I do the same, I retreat to my chapel and ugly cry for every person I have walked to death. I thi