I looked back at my homily from the last time Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day coincided on the same day. It was 2018; not all that long ago. I used the illustration of “Bread and Roses,” the slogan that the Lawrence, Massachusetts mill workers created when they went on strike in 1912. They demanded enough pay for their daily bread as well as for beauty in their lives. Bread and roses, love and ashes. I also shared the story of St. Valentine, a priest in the Roman Empire who secretly married couples when the Emperor forbade soldiers from marrying. (Single men made for better soldiers than married men.) After he was arrested, Valentine tried to convert the Emperor to Christianity, but the plan backfired, and Valentine was executed. Love and ashes, indeed.
In rereading my sermon from six years ago, I was most surprised by my Lenten discipline that I shared with my congregation. I said that I was going to give up being sick. I had been on antibiotics for six out of the previous ten weeks and I was tired of being sick. If you read my burnout stories from a couple weeks ago, then you may remember that being sick often is a symptom of coming burnout. I did not recognize it as a symptom at the time. I had other reasons for it: we moved in 2017, exposing my children to different germs at their new school and so expecting to get sick. In addition, I started a different, stronger immunosuppressant therapy in December 2017, which was another reason to expect to be sick. After ten weeks, though, I’d had enough.
Unfortunately, I was only partially successful in achieving my Lenten discipline. I did not have any more infections requiring antibiotics. But that Lent is when I sustained my third, and most serious, concussion. It took months to recover from that concussion and I did not recover fully. I still have lingering light and noise sensitivity and have never again been able to read for as long as I might want to.
As many of you know, I sustained a fourth concussion just over three months ago. I am still recovering, which is why there have been gaps in this newsletter during these months. At times, my writing feels like ashes. (St. Thomas Aquinas referred to his masterpiece Summa Theologica as “straw” near the end of his life.) Yet when I’m actually writing, it feels like love.
Love and ashes seem to be two sides of the same coin. Bread is physical sustenance and roses meet our need for beauty. These are two of the levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I discussed last fall, one deficiency need and one growth need. Both are important; both are needed for self-actualization. Love and ashes, bread and roses. May we create space for both, not only in our lives but in the lives of those around us.