After a long hiatus, I was forced to write an essay for a scholarship application. QFC urged me to post it, so here it is. Cheers!

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This year, I was given the opportunity to help with the imposition of ashes at St. Paul’s Chapel near the World Trade Center site on Ash Wednesday. St. Paul’s stands directly across from Ground Zero and served as a place of solace and sanctuary for volunteers and service personnel to gather, organize, and rest during the long period of work after the terrorist attacks of September 11th and destruction of the World Trade Towers.

For an hour, one of my seminarian colleagues and I, in cassocks, stood at a station and imposed ashes on whosoever wished, as is the custom there. I didn’t know what to expect as I began: How much ash is enough? How do I make the cross? What do I say again? Are all these folks Episcopalian or even Christian? Will anyone come?

Taking my stand with bowl of ashes and thumb at the ready, I was allowed the awesome privilege of touching more than a hundred people, men and women, rich and poor, young and old, even infants, all different colors, different languages, different nationalities –”all sorts and conditions.” In each cross, I affirmed our common humanity by acknowledging our mortality in this simple ritual action–”Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” And I called each to a season of repentance and return to God.

Some knew to say, “Amen.” Others either didn’t know or forgot and said instead, “Thank you” or even “OK!” Some did not speak English. Some made eye contact, looking for a moment of encounter and recognition. Others were content to close or avert their eyes. A man came forward with his two young sons and pushed them towards us but didn’t come himself. It seemed to me that some had an idea of what it meant to receive the cross of ashes, while others did not. Some were obviously looking for a blessing and thought this might do. Whatever our various motivations and thoughts, in that moment of contact, there was an opening for new possibilities, an opportunity to still the distractions and listen carefully for the Divine acting in all the contingencies of our fleshiness.

During a pause in the stream of people, I was suddenly floored by the multiple layers of meaning inherent in these ashes on the site where I stood. In a moment, I remembered the pictures of men and women in business suits, running, covered with the ashes of the ruin of the Twin Towers. And here I stood, imposing this mark of penitence, this cross of ashes, in the very shadow of Ground Zero, that ever-present symbol of our human fragility in the face of events too horrible to fully comprehend.

As the hour passed, I became more and more aware of the transparency of which all ministry is capable. Though I had various duties at my home parish, my personality was almost always part of my work, adding color and particularity to what I was doing. At St. Paul’s that day, it did not matter to any of those people who I was in my particularity. What mattered to them is that I was the man in the cassock with the ashes in the church awaiting their approach with calm openness, making contact with them in this stylized, ritual gesture and leaving a mark. Yet, mysteriously, in that transparency, instead of feeling as if Jesus was visible through me, I was momentarily given the clarity of sight to see him! In each of their faces and hands, the unmistakable presence of the “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” On the cross, he bore the full weight and poignancy, the painful bittersweetness of our humanity–with all of its glories and intractable sins–and opened the way to salvation. Each person, in all their particularity, became a living reminder of his life, death, and resurrection, as one would recognize someone one had known years ago, no matter how changed.

One way the Scriptures describe the Holy Spirit is as a violent wind, like the one that filled the house where the disciples were gathered at the first Pentecost. So how can we perceive the activity of the Holy Spirit? By my lights, just as with wind: by the opening and closing of doors, and the unfurling and filling of sails. As I rode home on the subway, I felt changed, as if I had turned my sail to catch the force and vitality of a cleansing, invigorating wind. I can only hope that, in the mercies of God, some of those who came that night felt a refreshing breeze or found a door opened that had seemed closed forever.