Timbre!

Ash Wednesday
is counter-intuitive after
spending a long weekend
with two and four year old grandsons.

They resist sleep —
their motors idling high
and their fresh minds
a relentless mouse spinning
its treadmill of thoughts
a mile a minute.

Then they wake up
like a shot out of a canon —
0 to 70 in three seconds
with all thoughts in forward motion.

Too new for regrets
too ignorant to fear
too well loved to worry or dread,
they are bursting at the seams
with life
and verve
and explosively animated
with singularity
of thought, passion, and desire.

They are Easter morning
not Ash Wednesday.

So I come to this day
on this year
to this deeply authentic moment
only partially arrived.

But the part of me
that has arrived on this Ash Wednesday,
is the part slightly hung-over
from an encounter with
the burst and bloom
of young life.
Next to those limber, toe-headed
acrobats
I feel stiff and sore, slow and
more brittle
than I like to imagine myself.

While my grandsons inspire
me to sing a love song to Life,
they also evoke in me
poems
and prayers
and reverberating cogitations
about death.

The thin veil
between life and death
is the substance of Ash Wednesday.
Not because we are woeful, sinful wretches
but because we are terribly mortal ones.

It is a weird yet truly healthy
element of our spiritual tradition
that we have a day
to contemplate death.
Not to make us grievous —
that would be more like Good Friday.
But to cause us to stop
and reflect
on the timbre of our lives.

Now hold that thought for a moment:
the timbre of our lives.

It isn’t a word we use often,
unless we’re a music teacher.
But timbre
is such an apt word
to describe what we might want to reflect
on this Ash Wednesday.

Timbre is the quality
inherent in a sound.
It is the resonance
by which we recognize
someone’s voice,
or the distinctive quality of tone
produced by a singing voice
or instrument.
I can recognize our piano here
distinct from ours at home
from the timbre of each.

Well our lives have
a distinctive timbre also.
It is what will resonate with others
when we are gone —
what they will remember
about us
and what they will
continue to value about us.

The timbre of our lives
is what resonates
in the world around us —

the quality of the notes
that come from what we have treasured.
We are of course, sacramental:
each of us
outward and visible signs
of an inward and invisible substance.

The timbre of our lives
signals what is inside —
our inward and invisible substance.
And looking our mortality in the eyes,
which is what we are doing here
in case you didn’t know,
allows us to ask ourselves
if we wish to make any changes.
If so, now is the time to do it.

Where our treasure is
there will our hearts be also.
What is it we treasure?
Is our treasure
what we truly want it to be?
Does the treasure we hold
make our lives sing
in notes that compel others
to sing along?
Does what we treasure
cause our lives
to resonate beyond our own orbit?

Ash Wednesday
is the day we set aside on the calendar
to ask ourselves such questions.
Not for any sense of judgment
or condemnation —
because none of us
sings as sweetly as we wish we did.

Rather, to take stock
of what we truly treasure
and to change
if we think it might
improve the timbre of our lives.

Ash Wednesday
invites us to reflect
on our own mortality
and consider little changes
or big ones,
that help us to better line up
our treasure with our heart.

So instead of sack cloth and ashes,
and the language of sin and judgement,
let’s think about the timbre
of our lives,
and how we want
our lives to resonate
in the world around us
and among those with whom
we live, and work, and play.
Then,
then we can use our reflections
to imagine the changes
we want to make
while we are still on this side of the veil.