Get the Stoicism out of Your Lent

I need to get ashes out of my kitchen sink. This ladle full of cheap olive oil and the charred remains of 2025’s Palm Sunday has tipped into the wet mess. It’s coating the mac-and-cheese crust in bowls, the tines of the forks, and the “Make Today Count” coffee cup I used five days ago. (So much for that.)

This Ash Wednesday didn’t rhyme with the memories of my childhood. As a kid who grew up Irish Catholic (which is mega Catholic, IMHO), the day involved a reverent feeling of hush. The service at my high school was always somber and graceful, as our priest called bushels of teens to remember their mortality, tracing crosses over our brows, hitting the occasional speed bump of acne on the way.

This year, by contrast, was chaos.

We were wrecked from doing the working-parents-with-ill-child dance. We were texting family about a possible new diagnosis while kicking a path through unfolded laundry to reach the microwave. It looked like someone tossed my house trying to find the Maltese Falcon. There was no way our family was getting out of the door to go to church.

We rightly recall our deaths on Ash Wednesday. Sometimes, we receive the gift of extraordinary clarity that comes with this reckoning. The reality of dying, and the general tissue-thin fragility of our lives, can make what matters most float to the top. It can give us the wisdom to know when we should just leave the laundry on the floor and hold on to each other. As it is said, “Consider how ephemeral all mortal things are … tomorrow, a handful of ash.”

But there’s nothing actually Christian about that.

The quote above isn’t from scripture or a prayer book or a desert abba. It’s from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Aurelius was an emperor and a stoic who lived through war-ravaged, plague-ridden days. He would have rocked a “Make Today Count” mug. It’s not for nothing that contemporary stoicism had a trending moment in the wake of the pandemic. (It’s fizzled down a little bit now, though you can still go to Stoicon!) Stoicism was also a whole thing well before Jesus died, bloody and naked on the cross.

This year, I didn’t need anyone to remind me how delicate the machinery of muscle, blood, neurotransmitters, and stomach acid can be. I sure as hell didn’t have it in me to roll up my sleeves and make today count.

It seemed like everyone I knew was, in their way, feeling the ache of the same bruise. Death was making itself known, in the lag between test results, or texts from aging parents, or pictures of memorials on city sidewalks, or just from the groaning of our cracked hearts bent over kitchen sinks.

And God hates it.

God hates death.

This is what we can easily forget in the sooty entrance to Lent and the days that follow. It’s not a romanticization of the macabre. It’s certainly not stoicism with Christian window dressing. The shape of the cross screams out against the black smudge of our suffering and the threat of our destruction, even as it is shaped by it.

It’s tempting to forget this reality as the days roll on and we think we’re either winning or failing a forty-day challenge. Our penances all load up in imagined scales that will … what? Demonstrate our grit? Prove we earned the right to say Alleluia?

Lose us the love of God?

Remember the difference between the ash of a stoic emperor and the ash of the murdered Messiah. One is a calm attitude of resignation in the face of a death-scarred reality. The other is the joy of knowing reality itself is held in being by a God completely in love with us, so much so that he refuses to let us die. That this God, in fact, loves every last atom of us into the pulsing constellation of dust that we are. He constantly holds our face in his hands with all the tenderness of a new mother. Because of this endless adoration, he could not bear letting our gorgeous, weak, beloved flesh simply feed the dirt.

So he entered this world of ashes, walked into death, and snapped the damn thing in half.

May we remember that it is by Christ’s gracious gift that we are given everlasting life (a quote that actually comes from the Ash Wednesday rite in the Book of Common Prayer). The light of the Resurrection isn’t a prize we win at the end of Lent or at the conclusion of our time in this valley of tears. It is already shining, warming our trek through the desert. And it is in and through this light that we can see our forty days, not as climbing a mountain to somehow earn Easter but as God sweetly melting down the idol of our imagined self-sufficiency. In the wilderness of our kitchens, offices, and hospitals rooms, we meet ourselves as broken, mortal creatures who desperately need to be loved back into life, as only Love Itself can.

So I took down the brittle palms we saved from last year that had been tucked behind the kitchen clock. We burned them in the fire pit on the porch. My husband mixed the small, dark pile of ash with a dab of oil in the ladle.

The kids stood before me, wreathed by the jumble of our daily lives. When I pressed the sign of the cross on their foreheads, I could feel the fine grit running over their soft, warm skin. I held their dirty faces in my dirty hands. They said “Amen.” And even though Lent had just begun, my heart replied “Alleluia” anyway.