My church doesn’t mark Ash Wednesday. There was recently a brief mention of the season of Lent, but that was about it. It’s not too surprising — it wasn’t something we made much of back when I was a child, either.

I grew up associating Lent with Catholicism, and at that point Catholicism was most often portrayed as something our Protestant heritage had cast off, something we had rejected as a lesser form of faith, something that was all about ritual, obligation and accumulating points.

How arrogant. 

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Did you ever see that movie “Wedding Crashers” with Owen Wilson and the big guy from Chicago Vince Vaugn? 

OK I didn’t ever see that movie either — I heard it was really bawdy and that type of humor makes me uncomfortable. The clean gist of it is that those guys show up at weddings when they don’t even know the bride or the groom. 

I feel little bit like I’d fit into a strange sequel to that premise because I just went to a funeral where I didn’t know the person who passed away. I can’t tell if that makes me a funeral crasher? It’s got to sound at least borderline crashed status.

I don’t even know the son of the woman who died. 

Am I sounding creepy yet?

I went to the funeral because I know the daughter-in-law. We work together. I enjoyed her very much but I don’t know her all that well yet, not in an emotional way.  She didn’t need me there. The son didn’t need me there. I asked myself more than once whether it was a good idea that I attend.

What I do know — or what I’m starting to know despite my resistance — is that funerals aren’t only about the person who passed away. 

With any flex of the imagination we are shoved into picturing the conditions we will one day find ourselves, in one way or another depending on how far we want to run with the thought. It doesn’t take much to realize that this isn’t your last event of this kind. And once you’ve been the one to sit in that front row, trying to make sense of what’s happening around you in that moment, the sting of death is one you feel for a long time afterward.

The fact that the funeral took place the night before Ash Wednesday was not lost on me.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

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I held my own Ash Wednesday service today. 

As I write that, I hear how wacky it sounds. 

I read aloud (because I had the house to myself for a little while) from the Common Book of Prayer, knelt and prayed, and even played a couple songs on our piano, just because it seemed right.

Although I was alone, I knew I was also gathered with thousands of people across the world who were also acknowledging their mortality, their mistakes and shortcomings, and marking the beginning of the season of Lent and the coming of Easter. The solitude while joining a great tradition is what appealed to me, a great tradition going back through the ages. I want that history, that sense of heritage, even though I find myself wrestling with understanding the differing scholarly interpretations of what Jesus accomplished at Easter. And it’s probably time I expand my tradition base to include some practices that are unfamiliar to me.

One if those practices is the acknowledgement of our own mortality, something we often do a good job of ignoring. I think it’s important to put ourselves in the proper perspective sometimes, and Ash Wednesday is a good time for that.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.