Ashes announce the first day of the season of Lent. Ash Wednesday is a holy day for Christians, beginning the time when Jesus was driven into the wilderness to, well, consult his soul and his God about his own choices. On this day priests, or laity if no priest is available, smear ashes onto each upturned forehead to remind us that we are mortal and beloved as such. The imposition of ashes is the ritual that springs us into Lent, a season that has nothing to do with things borrowed or lent! It does have to do with one’s own willingness and ability to, let’s say, think things over—not as a life review, but as a way to spend more time in quiet and to ask yourself: Is there anything or anyone in my life that gently tugs at me, visiting my quiet contemplative time with worry, or wonder, or regret, or simple uncertainty—or any ongoing temptation to sin, understood as anything that separates us from the goodness in ourselves, God, or our neighbor.
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For the last two years I have had regular, often daily, conversations with an old friend and Episcopal priest, the Rev. Lee McGee-Street. Lee was my, and many other women’s mentor, in and through the ardors of the ordination process in the Episcopal Church in the late 1970s and 80s. Although we women were finally voted “ordainable” as priests in 1976, it took years for the “law” to settle into the minds and hearts of a people formed in patriarchal language and hierarchical politics. The process felt like wiggling a fat’n happy overweight man into a corset meant for a petite ballerina.
Lee McGee, then an Episcopal deacon from Washington D.C., had been one of those courageous women (eleven in Philadelphia in 1974, and four in D.C. in 1975) who bucked the traditional system to get ordained priest, with the "Washington Four" before the official vote was taken. These ordinations were labelled “irregular”. They were not illegal, because a bishop carried out the sacramental rite. Still, these women had to endure another ceremonial liturgy to get “regularized” so that they could function as priests with sacramental authority: to bless, consecrate and absolve.
The ordaining male bishops suffered no consequences of course. (Amazing what you can do after you retire, your pension is secure—and you’re a man.) Nevertheless, every institution has it rules and regulations to create a sense of order. The Church is no different.
Lee, herself, had first been against the idea of pushing the Church into taking action on gender justice, but she soon changed her mind. She had a rich career as a chaplain, counselor, parish priest, and professor of pastoral studies at Yale Divinity School. She was very present to me and other women as we floundered into and through the journey to priesthood in Connecticut, encouraging us to persist, informing us about the dynamics of the double standard, and later helping us to understand how hard it was for male clergy, who had controlled the sacramental life of the Church for centuries, to lose that primacy and to suffer a “breach of collegiality”—aka old boys’ club. One meant loss of power, the other loss of intimacy. The Church today is not the only institution still learning to live with the idea of shared power.
Dick and I had left Connecticut for Massachusetts in 1997, and in 2020 returned, just as the COVID pandemic was taking hold, to live in a retirement community in Simsbury. Lee and I resumed our connection and had daily telephone conversations, rich with humor and debates about church politics, and feminism. We were moving from our mentor/mentee relationship to good old friendship.
In these last two weeks, I continued to call and leave messages, yet received no callbacks. This was not usual. I knew that, Lee as she aged, became housebound with painful arthritis, had regular caregivers, experienced some depression, was grieving the death of two husbands, and lived with a form of macular degeneration that had left her legally blind since her late twenties. I also knew that she was one of the more resilient women I’d ever known. She never talked—except I imagine to her therapist of years, her several beloved guide dogs, and perhaps God—about her disabilities. It was never easy to, well, be empathic or feel Lee’s own pain with her. She was always “fine,” and she always turned the conversation away from herself to me. Each time we talked, I pressed her a bit about how she was—really. She consistently assured me, “I’m all right.” I wondered. I doubted her “all-rightness” and felt helpless.
On Tuesday, March 1, I saw a message on an online site for Episcopal clergywomen that Lee, at 78, had died on February 20, 2022. My heart crimped with grief, and also some anger. Why could she not have told me she was in that much decline? I was slow to remember that this was how Lee had managed her difficult life all along. She helped others, period. My grief would have some ambivalence; no grief is ever pure. Nevertheless, Lee and I had been, and would always be, connected enough through God, our seminary, and our passion for the causes of women in the Episcopal Church, to make my grief whole and holy.
Thank you, Lee McGee, and bless you always.
So what has this remembrance to do with Ashes and Lent?
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I suppose I will never get over the allure of ashes, black smudges on the forehead in the shape of a cross. It is a powerful ritual to acknowledge the beginning of Lent, yes, and also to remember how small, silly, and yet how beloved we all are in God’s eye.
When I worked in the 1980’s as a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, a big bustling city hospital, and later at an addictions treatment hospital, I used to bring a small vial of blessed ashes to work on Ash Wednesday. I was astounded at how many people, staff and patients, wanted me to smear their forehead with ashes. They chased me down. When each one stood before me, some much taller than I, I tiptoed or they bent. I said to each: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Oh, how I wanted to add a little phrase of reassurance, something silly like, like don’t worry, God always loves you and will resurrect your soul forever. Oh, how fearful so many of us are of dying and being gone—just gone.
On Ash Wednesday I felt, and feel, like a small child again, hoping someone will just pick me up and hug me forever close. All I can do is grieve for my friend, Lee, and ask another friend to smear my own forehead with black ashes and remind me.
Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
There is something astonishingly unifying about this visible ritual—an outward gesture of our common humanity, the tattoo that marks our common nature. Without exception.
