A Pinch in the Fabric: A Reflection on Ash Wednesday 2022

Post Author: Rev. Katharine (Katie) L. Steele

I was in 8th grade the first time I learned there was a Nazi in my family tree.

My mom was helping me with a school project for my English and Language Arts class. We were reading The Diary of Anne Frank. I learned much later that my English teacher covered this topic only with those classes with whom she trusted the material. The assignment was to create a family album and to learn about our history and narrative. As we were talking about how my grandparents came to live in Cincinnati, Ohio, my mom pulled out the old photo. She hesitated before showing it to me. “I want you to know that I will understand if you choose not to include this in your photo album,” she said. “I’ll leave that decision up to you.” Mom knew how cruel middle school kids could be. I doubt she trusted my classmates as much as my English teacher did. Who knew how they would react?

There it was, in black and white: a great uncle in his Nazi uniform seated next to his two young boys in their brown shirts. Mom explained that this great uncle is a family member about whom the family rarely talked. I’m still not sure how it came to be in my mother’s possession. Yet there it was, and it could not be ignored. Mom and I talked about what an impossible decision families faced if they were unable to emigrate from Germany: either join the Nazi party or face starvation. Even as an 8th grader, I knew that we cannot erase our history. We must attend to our histories.

I chose to include the picture in my photo album and take it to school. The ugly truth is that some of us have Nazis in our family trees, I decided. That did not make me a Nazi, and I did not want to hide from the truth but bring it into the light. Unless we face our history, how can we hope to change our future? I made this decision before I knew that one of my classmates would bring in her album with stories of members of her family who were killed in the Holocaust.

Years later over burgers at a local diner, my former 8th grade English teacher would admit to me that my class was the first time teaching The Diary of Anne Frank that resulted in her students sharing their personal and differing family narratives in such a way. She said that for middle schoolers, we talked about it with such maturity and empathy for one another that she has never forgotten that year.

Fast forward to Ash Wednesday 2022. It has been ten years since I left my posting as Young Adult Missionary with the United Methodist Church in L’viv, Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces had ramped up to inconceivable levels. While the war had been ongoing for eight years in the eastern part of the country, it was now inching closer to western Ukraine. I had spent the week checking in with my friends, consumed with worry for their safety. 

Adding to my personal “fog of war” on this first day of Lent, I’m also the recently hired Palliative Care Chaplain at a pediatric hospital. Earlier in the day, I was asked to impose ashes for a patient in the ICU and their family, just days after a somber care conference about the expected trajectory for this sick kiddo. Here I stand in the main hospital concourse with a small container of ashes in my hand, ready to offer a reminder of our mortality to anyone who wishes.

Ash Wednesday has never evoked quite this level of existential pondering for me. On this Ash Wednesday, death felt close. It was an ever-present companion that day. From the ICU rooms to Ukraine, geographically half a world away but always in my heart, it was almost too much to bear.

Then I came across a re-sharing of a portion of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People on Instagram that helped put Ash Wednesday in perspective. She writes:

“Here’s my image of Ash Wednesday: If our lives were a long piece of fabric with our baptism on one end and our funeral on another, and we don’t know the distance between the two, then Ash Wednesday is a time when that fabric is pinched in the middle and the ends are held up so that our baptism in the past and our funeral in the future meet. The water and words from our baptism plus the earth and words from our funerals have come from the past and future to meet us in the present. And in that meeting we are reminded of the promises of God: That we are God’s, that there is no sin, no darkness, and yes, no grave that God will not come to find us in and love us back to life. These promises outlast our earthly bodies and the limits of time.”

This past Ash Wednesday was a defining moment in which I recalled my baptism, that moment of being accepted into the family of God and being washed in God’s prevenient grace. It was one on which I pondered my mortality and the legacy I would like to leave behind. I cannot change the narrative of my family’s past. But I sure can do my part to change the story which will be told to future generations. The war in Ukraine is personal. I feel more responsible for educating others about Ukraine and the importance of this moment in history than I have for most other causes in which I am invested. This is my chance to change the narrative and make a better, more justice-centered choice than my ancestors.

In a time that feels so incredibly bleak, this Lent I am clinging to that promise that “we are God’s.” I am clinging to the promise that somehow, despite the seeming hopelessness, light and life will indeed triumph over evil and the chaos that surrounds us. I might not know the distance between this moment and my eventual funeral, but I do know that one day, when my great-great grandniece or grandnephew is compiling their own family album, the stories they will share will not be of one who stood by idly while evil worked to turn everything and everyone into dust sooner than it was their time. Their stories will instead be those of family members who did their level best to sound the alarm, encourage humanitarian aid, and preach the love of God and the inclusion of all people at God’s table. 

Suggested Resources from the Author:

Here is the page for the ministry where the author was placed in L’viv: https://umcmission.org/advance-project/14055a/

For a running update of what’s happening:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-60949706

Ukrainian News sources:
https://kyivindependent.com/
https://www.kyivpost.com/
https://ukraineworld.org/
https://bunews.com.ua/

Reliable video coverage in English:
https://youtu.be/m01az_TdpQI

Article about a Ukrainian Easter tradition:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/30/ukraine-eggs-pysanky-easter/