today is ash wednesday and so, when you see someone with a black smudge on his head, roughly in the shape of a cross which really won't look much like a cross at all because the priest was either in a hurry and/or the guy forgot it was on his forehead and accidentally rubbed it half-off in angst over being stuck in traffic, don't act all ignorant and say something stupid like, "you got somethin' on your forehead." because for one thing, "you got" is bad english and for another, it's freaking ash. wednesday, people.
ash wednesday is probably the number one thing, as a kid, that made me want to be a catholic. i remember my st. teresa friends coming home from school with black crosses (more or less) on their foreheads and when i saw them coming, it was like, here comes Jesus.
it was that important of a symbol.
and i wanted to be a part of it.
those black smudges fascinated a presbyterian girl like me whose church and its practices were stripped almost entirely of anything symbolic. of anything that might remind me of what faith means. i never looked at those ash wednesday foreheads as something strange or worse, unnecessary. i looked at them as what they were: BILLBOARDS for the rest of us to wake up.
to fall up.
to fall up in loving Christ. to grasp it. to get it. and then,
to spread it. to spread the good news of the gospel, starting with one easy, startling post-it note for the world to see: ashes. on your forehead.
i also always loved the rosary beads. not so much because they were pretty (not all of them were) but because you could see them. touch them. i remember the first time i held a strand of rosary beads in my hands. i was 5 and they belonged to my best friend, marilyn. when she handed them to me, because she knew i was curious, i remember seeing my hands shake. i don't know what i was afraid of - that i would drop them, i suppose. and that the tiny cross with the little Jesus on it might break.
i didn't want the beads to fall down.
i wanted them to lift me up.
and they did.
but of all the things that catholics do - and i loved them all - wanted them all - the one that i loved the most was (is) the one that i saw them doing the most:
making the sign of the cross.
making the sign of the cross wasn't just something that happened on ash wednesday. it didn't just happen on easter or Christmas or when it was your turn up to bat. it happened all. the. time. it was thee most visible TV commercial of all: come to Christ. He has saved you.
one day in the middle of an especially hot (don't get me started) summer, marilyn decided enough was enough. if this little friend of hers (me) wants to be a catholic this bad and her presbyterian parents ain't budgin' (also bad english), then marilyn decided to take matters into her own hands. and she did. we did.
we rigged up an altar out of cardboard and a couple of boards we found in her garage which, sidebar here, marilyn's dad had an awesome garage. and he spent a lot of time in it. it was his man cave - only nobody knew what a man cave was back then. everything was perfectly in place - all his tools, all his car stuff, everything. he probably kept inventory for all i know. and i have no doubt that he noticed right away - as soon as he got home from work that evening - that those boards were missing.
if he ever said a word to marilyn about it, i don't know it. good old catholic cliff jacobs no doubt kept his mouth shut.
and smiled.
but i digress.
so, we got some cardboard and some regular boards and made an "altar," and marilyn put some kind of very ugly (sorry, mare) scarf around her head - to make herself look like a priest, i guess - but she looked more like a gypsy on halloween - and she got a glass from the kitchen cabinet, took it outside and filled it with water from the hose (which we probably sprayed all over each other because even though we were about to do something very serious, it was hotter than frick, folks), and she said some kind of (to me) magic words over the water, dipped her fingers in it, said some more "magic words," and declared me a catholic.
and then she told me to make the sign of the cross.
which i did.
upside down.
i like that story.
i like it because what i did upside down was actually what i did upside up.
just like those rosary beads.
just like those ashes.
just like ashes, ashes.
we all fall
up.
