Tarot for Ash Wednesday

In which I remember that I am dust

CW: If Christianity is triggering for you, you might want to skip this one.

The religious culture of the house in which I grew up was something between areligious and anti-religion. My great grandma on my mom’s side was a believer—mostly, I think, because she liked the idea of a vengeful God—but everybody else was nominally Christian in the way that I assume most Americans were in the first half of the 20th century. We got dressed up on Easter and had a big family dinner, but we did not go to church. We never went to church.

My dad’s people were what I call “hillbilly agnostic.” There were a lot of family ghost stories and tales of UFO encounters. Cryptids were generally regarded as plausible if unproven. As for God… strong maybe. To the extent that our belief system was organized, it revolved around In Search Of…¹

And this is probably why I grew up with a sort of free-floating fascination with all things spiritual. The Catholic Church held a special allure. They pulled me in the way they’ve been pulling people in since the beginning, more or less: excellent music, great art, fancy outfits, saints with absolutely wild biographies… And then there are the rituals.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the Crowning of Mary takes place on May 1

My kid went to a Catholic school for a while, and he had to attend Mass once a week. I went with him because I wanted to know what he was learning in church, but also because I liked going to Mass. I couldn’t take Communion, but I could get a blessing, and I considered a blessing from Father Don to be good magic. I also loved the Crowning of Mary, which is just straight-up goddess worship as far as I’m concerned. My favorite, though, was probably Ash Wednesday.

In contemporary American culture, Christmas is the star but, from a theological—and historic—standpoint, Easter is where it’s at. Anybody can get born, but Jesus rose from the dead. That’s what makes him special. First, though, Jesus had to die, and I am powerfully moved by how the earliest Christians and the Catholic Church deal with this fundamental truth. Jesus may be God, but his humanity is most evident when he asks God to spare him a painful, ignominious death² and when, with his dying words, he asks why God has abandoned him.³ This is real shit—human shit—and I admire how even a faith that preaches eternal paradise for anyone who is straight with Jesus still asks adherents to sit with the truth of their own mortality.

If you attend an Ash Wednesday Mass, you will be asked to sit with the truth of your own mortality, and then you will be invited to let a priest mark you with the sign of your own mortality. Jesus’s first followers experienced grief and fear and dread after he died, and Ash Wednesday is a ritual that recreates something like that grief and fear and dread for people who know what will happen on Easter Sunday.

Remember you are dirt, and to dirt you will return

In this world, death is the only thing we can be sure of. I do not claim to be chill with this and I think I’ve met, like, one person who is. There are whole religious traditions built around finding peace with death, and learning the lessons of these traditions takes decades. I am, myself, trying to make friends with death step by tiny step. And one of the ways I’m doing that is by working with the Death card.