February 2016
St. Mark’s News Volume 20/Issue 2
From the Assistant Rector Thank you all for welcoming me so warmly to your St. Mark’s family. This February, I’m so excited I’ll be able to journey with you through the upcoming holy seasons of Lent and Easter. It all starts with Ash Wednesday on February 10th. Ash Wednesday is the strangest of holy days. We all take considerable time to clean our hair and face each day. Together, we Americans spend $1.4 billion a year on shampoo. We insist our children wash their hands, and we give the evil eye to any adult who shortcuts that step in a public bathroom. But, on Ash Wednesday, we have ashes smeared on our foreheads. We get dirty. Of all the physical rituals we do in the Church, this might be the strangest—the most mysterious. In ancient times, people would demonstrate their sorrow and mourning by publicly dumping ashes on their head—a powerful picture of how they felt inside. Ashes are a picture of our origin (“remember that you are dust”), and picture of our body’s destiny (“and to dust you shall return”). Ash Wednesday is also the first step we make toward Easter, towards resurrection. So, in order for us to more deeply enter into this first step, I offer these four snapshots of Ash Wednesday:
In this Issue From the Assistant Rector ......... 1 Vestry Highlights ........................ 2 Lent and Holy Week .................. 5 Adult Formation ......................... 5 Outreach .................................... 6 Parish Life .................................. 6 Parishioner Highlights ................ 7 Christian Formation ................... 8 Caffeine Ministry ........................ 9 Celebrations ............................ 10 ROTA ....................................... 11
Snapshot #1 The teenaged boy dove into the ditch, as the American bombers came into sight and started dropping their payload on the German town next to his concentration camp. About this time every afternoon, he crouched there with the other prisoners, pressing his body against the side of the ditch closest to the sound of the blasts. Sometimes, in the ditch, he’d imagine they were all riding the subway in New York City, like he’d done with his parents and sister four years before the war. Just like the subway riders, the prisoners in the ditch never looked at each other. The boy had dug the ditch with the other prisoners, during their first weeks in the camp. It used to be deeper, but in the last several weeks they’d been filling it in with wheelbarrows full of ashes. Snapshot #2 The old man lit another cigarette as he stared into the sink where he poured his last bottle of alcohol, 20 years before. He remembered that night, 20 years ago, when he came home drunk following an afternoon of drinking. His young son was in the kitchen, shuffling in his mother’s high heels. He yelled at the boy and told him to take them off. The boy didn’t, and started shuffling away. “No son of mine runs away from me,” he bellowed as he crossed the room and backhanded him on the side of his head. The old man remembered the boy as he snuffed his cigarette into the sink’s ashes.
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