Ashes

I did not come to faith in the age of miracles.
I came late, when everything must be explained
by statistics, laboratories, and committees.

Men adjust the mechanisms of history
with careful hands
and call the result reason.

After many years
I have learned to distrust enthusiasm.

Convictions grow easily
where loneliness is deep.
They resemble mushrooms after rain,
sudden, persuasive,
fed by darkness.

Once I tried to believe by force.
As one might push a key
into a lock swollen by weather.

The door did not open.
Only the metal bent.

So I returned without argument.

The church was as it had always been:
stone worn by many winters,
wood darkened by breath and candle smoke.

The hymns began.

They were not convincing.
Yet they persisted.

Human voices rose toward the ceiling
as if persistence itself
might be a form of hope.

Ash was placed on my forehead.

The dust of burned branches.
What remains
after something living reaches toward the light
and fails.

Remember that you are dust.

Yes.

That I know.

I remember hospital corridors at morning.
I remember unopened letters.
I remember how easily a life
can be altered by hands not our own.

Mortality requires no theology.
It administers itself.

What changed is something else.

I no longer need the universe
to certify my kneeling.

Knowledge asks for proof.
Faith asks for presence.

They do not contradict each other.
They simply speak different languages.

When I was young
I believed certainty would save me.

Later
I believed exposure would free me.

Now I believe neither.

To live forever outside the church
is also a kind of pride.

So I sit among them.

Among those who affirm what I cannot affirm.
Among those who reject what I cannot reject.

I borrow neither courage.

If God exists
He has survived the doubts of better minds.

If He does not
still the act of attention
changes the one who attends.

So I remain for a while.

Not as believer.
Not as rebel.

Only as someone learning
the limits of the mind.

I take what nourishes.
I leave what harms.

The liturgy passes over me
like weather over stone.

The ash cools on my skin.

It gives no answer.

But answers were never guaranteed.

I am not permanent.
I am not sovereign.
I am not spared the ordinary end.

Yet here I am
breathing in a house built by the dead,
speaking words that outlived those who wrote them,
waiting without assurance
for whatever comes.

If meaning exists
it will not appear as proof.

If grace exists
it will not argue.

Call it discipline.
Call it endurance.

Call it the habit of standing still
for a moment
in the presence of what we cannot know.

For now
that is enough.