Death and Denial: An Ash Wednesday Reflection

“We’re all gonna die.”
– Sufjan Stevens, on ‘Fourth of July’, from his best—and saddest—album Carrie & Lowell

“We’re all gonna die.”
– Qoheleth, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes (paraphrase)

We’re all gonna die, but that does not mean we like to talk about it. This statement makes us uncomfortable. So we deny the reality of death, either through sanitized language about those who “pass away,” or by countless actions that push it far away. Esau McCaulley illustrates this well saying, “We dye our gray hair, trade in our glasses for contacts or vision surgery, and add a mile or two to our runs. We do all we can to ignore death’s presence or wish it away, including hiding the elderly and infirm from sight in nursing homes and hospitals.”¹ While we do not like to talk honestly about death, the Bible is quick to do so, especially in the Psalms. Learning from this, David Taylor argues that we need to “learn how to speak honestly and truthfully about dying, death, and the dead.”²

Enter Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent.

I am a Pentecostal. We have been, quite famously, anti-liturgical. While this came from a place of radical openness to the movement of the Spirit in our gatherings, in some ways it has meant that we have ended up with the least thoughtful liturgy. All that to say, our churches tend not to place a high value on Ash Wednesday and Lent. But there is something important for us to grasp hold of each year: we’re all gonna die. Tish Harrison Warren acknowledges both our aversion to Lent as well as how it is an essential practice for us when she writes, “I can be tempted to skip too quickly to the resurrection, to skim over the sad stuff, but the liturgical calendar requires me to pause and notice the unresolved chord of our present reality.”³

Death is that unresolved chord of our present reality. Pausing and taking notice of it is helpful in a couple of ways. First, it helps us see, and lament with, those who are suffering and dying in our communities. Kate Bowler writes of her experience being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at thirty-five, and given little hopes of surviving. Her comments are blunt and forceful: “I am facing death and the church has demanded that, for the forty days of Lent, everyone stare it down with me. We are solid flesh, and we are ashes.”⁴ When death makes us uncomfortable, unsure of how to bring comfort to others, Lent forces us to acknowledge its reality without trying to avoid it. Seeing and hearing from those who are dying may even help us avoid painfully unhelpful words of “comfort” like “everything happens for a reason.”

Pausing and taking notice of the reality of death also helps us admit our own reality; that while we are solid flesh, we are also ashes. The liturgy of Ash Wednesday, which starts the season of Lent, comes from Genesis 3:19, which states “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When we deny the reality of death in our own lives, this passage may sound depressing. Sure, it can be read with a tone of despair, but, in reality, it is a truth we need to hear. Chris Green writes, “By grace, Lent reminds us that we are dying creatures, that we are nothing more than dust—strangely animated and self-aware dust, to be sure, but dust nonetheless.”⁵ We are reminded that we will some day die, and the world will continue on without us. We are not the centre of it all.

The season of Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, where we confess our denial of death, repent of our self-sufficiency, and admit that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. It then typically involves forty days of fasting—from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, not including Sabbaths (Sundays). Fasting is a powerful antidote to our denial of the reality of death. We momentarily give up certain comforts in life—comforts that are not necessarily bad, but comforts that have the tendency to numb us to the reality of death and suffering. Tish Harrison Warren writes on how ascetic practices like fasting are “an exercise in discomfort. We train our need for comfort like people housetrain puppies. By doing so, we learn over time how to enter into a soothing that is deeper than what’s offered by our drug of choice. We learn to face the pain we are avoiding.”⁶

So, this season of Lent, I encourage you to stop denying the reality of death. Instead, pause. Notice it. Acknowledge the suffering and death around you. Pray with the Scriptures that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Give up a comfort—a drug of choice—that keeps this unresolved chord of our present reality at a distance. And sing along with this song from The Brilliance, which brings together the reality that we are dust, and the glory of God, and offers this final prayer: “Be still my soul, Lord make me whole, Lord make me whole.”

¹ Esau McCaulley, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal (InterVarsity Press: 2022), 11–2.
² W. David. O. Taylor, Open and Unafraid: The Psalms as a Guide to Life (Thomas Nelson, 2020), 143; cf. Allen Verhey, The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (Eerdmans, 2011), 346.
³ Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (InterVarsity Press, 2021), 121.
⁴ Kate Bowler, Everything Happens For A Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (Random House, 2018), 133.
⁵ Chris E.W. Green, Surprised By God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters (Cascade Books, 2018), 47.
⁶ Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night, 133; If you have struggled in the past with fasting something for Lent, Warren writes that she is so bad at it, twice she has given up Lent for Lent, admitting it an absolute cop-out, p. 132.

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