It is time to pivot away from groundhogs, Super Bowl overdosing, and post-holiday clearance sales to, well, what? For most, winter lingers, summer is a fantasy, and spring is a cruel tease. For some places it’s become mud season, for others the despair of a presidential election looms. But for those of us who have lived in a time when American culture had Christianity as its back beat, there is no question about a mid-winter directional signal.
Ash Wednesday is here. As in sack cloth and ashes being smudged on our faces, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Before we pinned ribbons in virtue signaling colors on our lapels, we declared our mortality on our foreheads, in unavoidable central focus.
Rather than social guilt-tripping, consciousness-raising, or statement-making, Ash Wednesday simply declares that our death is inevitable. A ritual for that base normality, as inevitability as grace and life after death. We are dying. Every day.
We Baby Boomers are leaving the room in a social tide unseen since the tidal wave of our birthing. There were 85 million of us born unto The Greatest Generation from 1946 to 1964. Now, The Baby Boom Death Clock says that about a third of us are already dead. One of my tribe becomes room temperature every 15 seconds, over 5,000 of us a day.
Nothing new here, just the old aging out of living. But the most universal of realities have infinite personal consequences. Tragic events know no season — accidents, wars, the health anomalies of youth are behind us. Boomers are death trending as a matter of natural course, and we now jump to the automatic thumbing to the Obituaries Section of every publication, death-posting website, or social media announcement. The endless hyped “Happy Birthday” posts are being replaced with the “I am sorry to share with you …” posts.
“Nothing focuses attention like the hangman’s noose,” and for we Boomers our lives of near total self-absorption, justification, and expression find a new aspect manifesting our narcissism: living our best death. Full-on death avoidance via exercise, diet, therapies, and “spirituality” engagements are woven with kamikaze health interventions, “Bucket List” obsessions, and “journaling” (I am in a spasmodic, lurching memoir creation.) Hair dying is out, long walks with your cell phone camera are in. Endless documenting of food production is in, parties are out. We are dancing with ourselves as fast as we can until we go silent.
I am not sure we ever understood that the reactionary terror over the possibility of the getting COVID was just a warmup to the assured mortality that we all face. A mortality worn on our face on Ash Wednesday.
To what end is our anxiety? What is the net-net of our personal after-action report? We now know “he who dies with the most toys, wins” is a total loser, but we want to find meaning in our hair loss, neck waddles, and joint pain. As a generation, Boomers turned away from the redemption of faith. As Abby Day says in her book, “Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion Shaping Belief and Belonging, 1945-2021”:
Parents of the 1940s and 1950s raised their Boomer children to be respectable church-attendees, and yet in some ways demonstrated an ambivalence that permitted their children to spurn religion and eventually to raise their own children to be the least religious generation ever.
That ambivalence is losing its ennui in favor of existential panic. One of those Greatest Generation parents, my long dead mother-in-law, expressed her type of faith at my wedding rehearsal dinner in 1980. Raising her glass in a toast, she remarked, “To absent friends: May we all get what we deserve.”
Boomers think we deserve just about everything. If death calls such a calculation into question, then Ash Wednesday is a reset.
We do not earn death, we are given it, just as we were given life. Our inability to justify or even add up the measurables that life gives us is the message of Ash Wednesday. The message of the Ash Wednesday service is simple enough:
Almighty God, you have created us out of the dust of the earth: Grant that these ashes may be to us a sign of our mortality and penitence, that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Savior.
For Baby Boomers we are approaching at light speed the end of bucket lists, having the most toys, or hair loss: we Boomers are staring into the very reality that we lived our lives trying to avoid. In funeral after funeral, we hear these words on a regular basis:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For if we live, we live unto the Lord. and if we die, we die unto the Lord. Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors.
As the death toll of our generation keeps climbing, the debate, conversation, and all other distractions from our mortality are coming to an end, our end. Ash Wednesday is a death before death, in ashes put on our forehead that display the inevitable that awaits us.
May we all get what God gives us. We have no other choice.
Memento Mori….
The End