Love – Caminobleu

It is Ash Wednesday, 2023. We wait in San Francisco’s new Harvey Milk airport terminal, a spectacular tribute to the progress made in gay rights in the fifty years since the San Francisco commissioner’s assassination. My husband Kent and I are on the way home.

“I’m not going to get any ashes today. Have you seen anyone with ashes on their foreheads?”

“I haven’t noticed,” he says.

I was raised Presbyterian with a Swedish Covenant family background. Churches were plain. Crosses were bare, and there were no statues, few candles, and certainly none in front of statues of saints. Little glasses were passed along the pews for communion. There was no kneeling or walking to an altar. The Eucharist was a private affair between the pew-sitters and God. No one knew who participated and who didn’t. And no one put ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

People walked up to the altar for a wedding or a baptism or were carried in a coffin for a funeral. They also went forward during evangelical revival meetings in answer to a call to be saved. Revival meetings, often held in tents, were not part of Presbyterian practices, but a couple of times, my Swedish Covenant relatives took me to tent meetings.

I still hear the preacher call on a long-ago summer evening, “Come forward to Jesus! Ask for forgiveness! Be saved!”

Am I saved? I wonder. Was it enough to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” each night before I go to bed and bring my dimes tied in a clean handkerchief for the offering on Sunday?

As if reading my thoughts, the preacher says, “Going to church on Sunday is not enough. Come forward!”

I give my uncle a questioning look. He doesn’t go forward, although lots of people do. I want to ask if he has already gone forward, but I don’t. He shakes his head, no, don’t go.

The preacher promises we’ll be “born again” and have eternal life in heaven instead of being tortured in the flames of hell. I worry about those flames of hell, but I know that even if I “get saved” tonight, nothing will change tomorrow. If I walk up and pray to get saved, I’ll be a hypocrite, which wouldn’t be good, would it? Maybe all those people going to the front are miserable and need saving. Will they go up over and over tomorrow, next week, or next year? Have they gone up before, or is once enough?

The preacher’s voice is compelling, “Come forward to Jesus!” My heart tells me I‘ll be damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

I sing silently, “Jesus loves me; this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” I pray, “Forgive me, Jesus. I love you, but I’m not joining that crowd. You’re not there, but with me here, aren’t you?”

That night, I dream of people screaming in the fires of hell.

Twenty-five years later, on my 33^rd birthday, I married Ed, a divorced cradle Catholic. After years of soul-searching, I accompanied him to the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center at the University of New Mexico, partly because I thought his faith was stronger than mine. Newman reminded me of some of the more informal protestant churches I’d known. I attended classes, and after a nun said she wouldn’t tell me that I could not take communion, that it was a matter of my own conscience, I participated in everything, and our children were baptized.

Ed, divorced and remarried, was also not a bona fide Catholic according to official rules. He was eligible to apply for an annulment but refused to do so.

“I was married with six children. An annulment declares a marriage never existed. That is not true. My marriage was alive and good, but it died.” Like me, he followed his conscience.

I stayed at Newman for over twenty-five years, even after Ed’s death, until the archbishop removed the Dominican Order and barred women from the altar. Then, my conscience told me I had to leave. I still mourn the loss of that community.

But long before that sadness and years before Ed’s death, I asked him, “What happens on Ash Wednesday? I’ve never been. Can we go?” I remembered my childhood friends, who got ashes on their foreheads, made a fuss about not eating meat on Fridays, and wore pretty dresses and bride-like veils for the big event that was First Communion.

We go, and to my surprise, I am moved to the core.

“Dust, you are. To dust, you will return.” When I feel the fingers making the mark of the cross on my forehead, I think, “This is the ultimate reality.” I feel a deep peace and acceptance of my mortality. We’re born, we live, and we die. No exceptions.

That’s it.

Long ago, I memorized Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life.”

“Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.”

Longfellow was right. It’s not about the soul but the body. And I am my body, and I love my body, though ever since I was born, it’s been on its way to decay and death. I continue to go to Ash Wednesday services. Recognizing that I share a common destiny with every living thing comforts me.

I look around the airport. There is not an ash-smudged forehead in sight. We fly to Las Vegas, where I see not a single one during the four-hour layover.

“No ashes anywhere,” I say to Kent. “Of course, it’s Las Vegas!” Sin City. The concourses are jammed with slot machines.

We board a long-delayed flight to Albuquerque. I’m sad I’ve missed Ash Wednesday. Should I ask Kent to smudge some ashes from the fireplace onto my forehead and say those solemn, grounding words when we get home?

When the plane lands, I ask the young woman in the aisle seat,

“Are you getting off in Albuquerque?”

“Yes,” she says and faces me. I gasp and smile.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen today with ashes!”

She doesn’t react or smile. She’s wearing a blue sweatsuit. Several other young women nearby are similarly dressed.

“Are you with an athletic team?”

“Yes!”

“What kind?”

“Track.”

“What kind of track?”

“Middle distance running.”

“Oh, wow!”

I’m delighted to have met her and finally see ashes on one face today. I’m doubly pleased that she is a runner. I tell her how wonderful it is that she can do this because there was no women’s track when I was in high school. No women’s athletics at all. She’s probably wondering when this crazy old lady will shut up.

“I am still angry that none of us were allowed the opportunity to be athletes in those days,” I tell her. “It is so wonderful you can do this!”

I’m sure she has no idea how much meeting her today means to me. I am happy to have found one person with ashes on her forehead, and even more, she is a person whose life follows a path that was denied to me.

Even though I missed Ash Wednesday, I was not totally alone, and I am comforted. Lent continues tomorrow, and the truth remains. Dust I am. To Dust, I will return. We’re all in it together.

17 March 2020

Grief: For the world transformed by the coronavirus pandemic, grief for the world we didn’t think we’d lose so suddenly, and perhaps irretrievably. I grieve for the loss of my freedom to travel, to visit friends and family, to live as I please. I grieve for the people of the world who are much more impacted than I have been so far: for those who are ill, those who have lost their incomes, and their loved ones. For Those who cannot, as our president admonishes us, “enjoy your living room.”

Yet, as I walked the ditch banks this afternoon, I thought of my life as a pilgrim, and how the pilgrim learns to accept whatever happens – learns that there are things that can be controlled and those that cannot. The hardy group of American Pilgrims on the Camino who gathered last weekend on the shores of spectacular Lake Tahoe, adapted to ever-changing circumstances as news of the pandemic and subsequent regulations assailed us. Travel to Europe was suspended, the Spanish Camino de Santiago closed and all pilgrims ordered to return to their homes, while a series of ever-bigger snowstorms caused many, including me, to depart from Lake Tahoe before the end of the Gathering, when a break in the snowfall presented an opportunity to cross the mountain passes.

So, here I sit, home now for twenty-four hours, thinking of all this as I listen to a recording of the great John McCormack singing Irish songs I’ve known and loved since my youth. They are melancholy, as the lovers are parted by distance and death. I’ve put on my shamrock necklace, even though I am not Irish, despite a hint of Celtic in my DNA. But I have children who are one quarter Irish, and my first husband Ed had an Irish twinkle in his eye and a lilt in his voice that perhaps came from his mother, Ellen Mildred Courtney.

My intention for this Saint Patrick’s Day was to celebrate with my daughter Psyche, her husband Saad, and my two adorable grandchildren, ages almost three and almost four months. But, alas, San Franciscans are “sheltering in place,” and to visit seemed foolhardy, if not impossible. I long to be with them, because despite my lack of Irish heritage, the days surrounding Saint Patrick’s Day are important ones that are associated with momentous turning points in my life.

In 1973, in Tucson, Arizona, I celebrated completing my comprehensive exams for a master’s degree in English literature by throwing a party for which my mother made Cornish pasties and I baked a cake which I decorated with a picture of Saint Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland. A reference librarian searched at length for details or an image of this legend, which we never found. I begged her to stop looking; and was embarrassed to tell her it was only to decorate a cake – not for some serious research project. Only after I became a reference librarian myself did I understand how librarians love the thrill and challenge of such searches and don’t want to to quit even when their patrons say, “Enough.”

Just four years later, on March 16, 1997, I first laid eyes on Ed Philips during my very first meeting of a Unitarian singles group in State College, Pennsylvania. We had a brief conversation, but there was something about him that caused me to write in my diary that very evening, “If God wants me to marry Ed Philips, so be it.” We were married on May 29 that same year, which was both of our birthdays, eighteen year apart.

In my kitchen hangs a beautifully framed group of photos. An inscriptions reads: Paquimé, near Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, visited by Linnea Hendrickson, Helen Williamson, Jeanne Howard, and Ross Burkhardt, March 17, 1999.

The day before we departed on this trip, we found a puddle of oil under my car in Jeanne’s driveway. Helen and I stayed an extra night in Las Cruces, so the car could be repaired. We had had a celebratory traditional Saint Patrick’s Day dinner with Jeanne and Ross and assorted family the previous day, topped off with Irish coffee. Now, as Helen and I drove alone across the remote, windswept roads of northern Chihuahua, we sang lustily along with John McCormack, a poignant memory, now that Jeanne (friend, adventurer, and trip and party organizer like me) is gone, and Helen (the first person I called upon Ed’s death) speaks to me no more.

Almost three years after Ed’s passing in June 2007, it was time to fulfill the vow I’d made while he was dying, to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. I was planning to walk in September, starting somewhere in Spain, depending how far I thought I could walk in three or four weeks. But in February 2010, I began reading Conrad Rudolph’s Pilgrimage to the End of the World, which filled me with a burning desire to walk from Le-Puy-en-Velay, in France, a distance more than twice as far as I’d intended to walk.

At a Christmas Eve party in 2009 – another event organized by Jeanne – I had met Kent, the “typewriter man.” In February, he had driven all the way from Las Cruces to Albuquerque, and I’d guided him to the junk stores and antique shops to look for typewriters. We had continued to correspond via email. Then in March, I decided it was time I hosted, as I often had with Ed, a Saint Patrick’s Day dinner, with corned beef, cabbage, Irish songs I had printed so everyone could sing, and even a Saint Patrick’s Day trivia quiz. As I assembled my guest list the ratio of men and women was unbalanced. Why not invite Kent? He could always say no. I sweetened the invitation by suggesting he spend the night and we go hiking the following day. I was still pondering whether I could possibly fit in a walk starting in France in April and May, before I had to be home for events in June and July.

Kent came, and that evening everyone had to leave the dinner party early, leaving the two of us alone by eight p.m. What to do with an evening stretching before us? We visited, then went to bed in our separate rooms, to be ready to arise early to hike. We took two cars, leaving one at the Embudo trailhead and another at Three-Gun-Spring. It was a fairly strenuous hike up over the pass that connected the two trails. I was testing myself, my new boots, pack, and hiking poles. Could I really take off to walk in France? That hike decided it – three weeks later I was walking alone in France, and writing to Kent (on computers with French keyboards that had z’s where the a’s should be).

That afternoon after our walk, we sat in my backyard eating leftover plum cobbler before he headed back to Las Cruces. He looked around the large yard and said, “I really l like your place.” It was so comfortable and companionable having him there, my heart gave a little leap, and I felt, “I think he belongs here.”

It would be another year before he came to stay, but that Saint Patrick’s Day was a turning point, and the beginning of a new beginning.

So now, after our ditch walk, and be-decked with shamrock necklaces, we are about to sit down, not to corned beef and cabbage and cobbler, alas, and without the company of friends, but to bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches, still happy to have each other in this broken world.