You are invited to receive the ashes of lament, or humility, and of transformation. A tent will be set up in the Meridian UCC parking lot for quick and easy access. All are welcome. Come as your schedule permits.

Heather, our Pastoral and Community Care Associate, writes: “Ash Wednesday 2020 was just weeks before lockdown, and my first experience with Meridian UCC/Frog Pond. I was in a season of learning and unlearning, and most days my heart was broken over a growing recognition of societal atrocities. I was dying to old ways, but my faith was regenerating.

As I received the ashes in a cross on my forehead, I was aware of the transmutability of all things. The cells of the burnt things were alive with the lie of a fixed ending. In truth, nothing ever really dies. Endings cannot fully erase the reality of what once was. Wood rot becomes soil. Lime becomes the blue in hydrangea petals. My grandmother's cells will someday be found within particles in space, and the faith of my parents is now a spirituality built around a remnant.

We may look around us and know that the practices and structures of this world that bring harm are due to be terminated. But perhaps a practice for this time of reckoning is to give life to the cells we want to find in the afterlife. What practices of the Church have consistently brought healing and should remain? What democratic truths bring life and justice? Who do we want to be when the old has burned away?”